“A reclamation of what was never lost, only silenced.” Lynda Lorraine, 2025
For Maharlika UK‘s first pioneering visual arts presentation for the Filipino diaspora in the UK, I present the first in my ongoing series exploring mythology, sovereignty and the reclamation of Filipino visual creative practice. Through paintings, drawings, sculpted forms and amulets these works explores, reimagines and juxtapose artefacts and symbols from Filipino culture and major European art collections. These pieces act as conduits; reviving, transmuting and reinterpreting colonially influenced traditions. They propose an alternate lineage. One where our icons of power, protection and spirituality evolved on our own terms as if we had remained a strong and autonomous kingdom of our own. The spirit and strength that has always lived within us, now shining beyond survival.
Power and Protection: The Offering, 2025, Plaster Casts on Wood Mounts, Polytych 25 x 30 cm
Echoing the plaster cast traditions of European antiquity, ‘The Offering’ reimagines indigenous Filipino sculpture within contemporary space. By translating ancient and sacred forms into the language of the museum, the piece questions whose histories are preserved and whose are erased. Each cast becomes both tribute and reclamation, redefined in the present moment.
Power and Protection: The Ancestors Who Have Always Been, 2025, Oil on Canvas, Tripique 91 x 122 cm
Drawing from three iconic Western paintings: the Descent from the Cross (Peter Paul Rubens), Liberty Leading the People (Eugène Delacroix) and Napoleon Crossing the Alps (Jacques-Louis David). This evolving triptych reclaims heroic, spiritual and sovereign imagery for a Filipino lineage interrupted by empire. By reimagining their meanings and symbols through a decolonial and mythic lens, the work restores agency to our ancestors who were always present, always powerful and never lost, only silenced.
Power and Protection: Kalayaan (Freedom), 2025, Metal Casts on Wood Mounts, Polytych 25 x 30 cm
Inspired by the agimat or anting-anting, amulets of protection in the Filipino spiritual tradition. This series reimagines these symbols for the present. The work honours a spiritual legacy and image base which predates and endures despite colonial erasure, while still acknowledging the ever present colonisational reverbarations which affect us today. Using these amulets to envision freedom not merely as resistance, but as reclamation of inner sovereignty and ancestral pride.
Debut: Maharlika UK: 83 Rivington Street, Shoreditch, London. EC2A 3AY
Open: 14, 15, 16 November 2025 – 12pm – late daily
