Reflecting
Canvas alampay (Filipiniana traditional shawl), buttons

​

Becoming
Single channel video, standard definition, 2 minutes 37 seconds 

​

Wanting
Projected text 

​

​

Button collections tend to grow slowly, but end up hardly being used. Each one a seemingly insignificant object with no purpose, collected in a box or a jar. Until one day, that purpose is revealed, a specific purpose for each button. The chance to fulfil itself.  

 

Living with my grandmother until I was six, a lesson she taught my sisters and I was how to sew by getting us to stitch button after button into scraps of old fabric. This repetition of cutting, knotting, pushing in and out, knotting again and cutting off the excess, built up a skill which has been useful for the rest of my life but also one that ties me to her forever. 

 

In life, some relationships may be transitory. Sometimes things are left unsaid and those regrets can never go away. We cannot turn back time. But what we can do is look back over the time we have lived, piecing together, one by one, all the many small moments, actions and lessons. This process of growing may be painstaking at times, taking our whole lives or even may never be fully complete, but taking the time to see what pieces fit together, makes up precisely who we are today.  

 

What seemed insignificant before, has a new relevance and a new importance. 

 

No longer are they just buttons, but vital missing pieces.