Dialogic
Mixed media on panel including acrylic, pencil, ink, pen, assorted papers, Kimono fabric remnant, graphite (36″ x 24″) $965.
Currently showing at Metchosin ArtPod
Artists in collaboration:
Tatjana Darling, Maurina Joaquin, dl clay
In this collaborative practice the art making began in solitude and uncertainty. Three distinct artistic voices worked independently within the shared thematic terrain of memory and identity, each approaching the subject through their own material vocabulary, emotional cadence, and lived experience. Memory here is neither fixed nor reliable; it is vulnerable, revisited and continually rewritten.
Through conversation and shared individual experiences what developed was not a seamless merging of voices flattened into sameness, but voices allowed to coexist in tension. At its core this collaboration asks what it means to create alongside others without losing oneself. The project embraces collaboration as an ongoing dialogue—one that acknowledges difference while searching for forms of connection that can endure within and beyond the act of creation itself.
The panel is comprised of 24 individual pieces of art, 6″x6″, with each artist contributing 8 pieces.
After a session of placing squares for optimal balance, they were carefully glued to the panel to come together as a whole.
Each artist entered the process carrying different archives. Some were tangible — photographs, handwritten notes, found objects, layered fabrics, recorded sounds, pieces of family history. Others were less visible: inherited grief, migration, silence within families, fractured cultural memory, forgotten languages, bodily memory, emotional residue. Through mixed media, poetry, haiku, drawing, painting, and assemblage, each collaborator constructed an individual response to the instability of identity and the persistence of memory. These works did not initially seek harmony. They were autonomous forms shaped by personal rhythms of reflection and inquiry.