Shannon Webb-Campbell interviews BIPOC Solidarities cover artist Marigold Santos
The Fiddlehead Winter 2022
Marigold Santos pursues an interdisciplinary art practice involving drawn, painted, and printed works, sculpture, tattooing, and sound. Her work explores self-hood and identity that embraces multiplicity, fragmentation and empowerment, as informed by experiences of movement and migration. She holds a BFA from the University of Calgary, and an MFA from Concordia University. As a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, she continues to exhibit widely across Canada. Marigold Santos lives and works in Mohkinstsis/Calgary.
Shannon Webb-Campbell: As your art practice is interdisciplinary – spanning drawing, painting, sculpture, tattoo – what specifically informs or fuels your art practice? How do these disciplines connect to one another?
Marigold Santos: Working within a range of media allows me to explore the continuous themes found in my work in various and diverging ways. I might lean towards one media over another when searching for the mark or gesture that can best describe what I am examining at the time. For instance, sometimes the fluidity of brush and ink on paper can convey the texture and nuance I am not only looking for in the drawn imagery itself, but can also be observed conceptually. I also find that moving from one medium to another keeps my practice experimental and engaging in the studio – each discipline requires such a different part of my brain and skillset than another (tattooing is vastly different in so many ways than painting a canvas). Having options for how I create also adds to the ongoing evolution of my work, allowing me to expand my visual vocabulary and deepen my research, of which centers notions of selfhood informed by a diasporic experience.
SWC: The Fiddlehead’s BIPOC Solidarities winter 2022 cover features your work “shroud (unfurling blooms unsettling), 2021,” which is an acrylic piece with pigment and gesso on canvas. Can you share with our readers what inspired this work, and perhaps how it relates to our theme?
MS: This piece features a figure that is set in a surreal and otherworldly landscape that seems familiar yet is void of any specificity of time or place. The figure is comprised of woven elements that render them in a process of coming together or coming apart, while at the same time blooms of the medinilla magnifica unfurl from their limbs. This work is a continuation of my series that are influenced by folklore, and the sensorial memories (sound, touch, taste) tethered to my heritage and ancestry. Abstracting the emotive responses to these sensorial memories allows me to create new connections, and discoveries relating to movement, migration, and change.
SWC: You were born in the Philippines and immigrated to Canada in 1988. How does your Filipino background relate to your art practice?
MS: Every aspect of my work reflects on my experiences of a person in diaspora, and how selfhood and identity can be multiple, fragmented, hybrid, and influx, which ultimately should be celebrated and embraced as a form of strength, empowerment, and resilience. Philippine folklore, textural landscapes, and sensorial relationships help inform the imagery in my work.
SWC: Who are some of the BIPOC artists, thinkers, and writers who inspire you?
MS: The list of inspirational BIPOC artists, writers, and thinkers is ever-evolving and growing for me, so the following names are but a few, and are in no particular order, and consist of incredible persons who I have had the pleasure of learning from and admiring from afar, or have had the opportunity to work alongside with in some project capacity in the last couple of years, and who I have truly appreciated for their dedication to their practice, their humour, their innovation: Rajni Perera, Alexa Hatanaka, Nep Sidhu, Audie Murray, Curtis Talwst Santiago, Therese Estacion, Helen Chau Bradley, Jagdeep Raina, Kablusiak, Winnie Truong, Thea Yabut, Seth Cardinal Dogdginghorse, Pantayo, Kuh Del Rosario, Roy Caussy, Darcie Bernhardt, Lindsay Phylo, Makoto Chi, Ciara Havishya, Robyn Maynard, Vivek Shraya, Rocky Rivera, Elle Barbara, Dominique Fung, Tamara Santibañez, Salman Toor, and the list goes on!
SWC: Congratulations on becoming a new mother! How do you think motherhood will inspire, encourage, or expand your art practice?
MS: Motherhood is wild! It has been teaching me so much about patience, compassion, and empathy among other things. It has changed my practice already, and has been since pregnancy. There is so much to say and so little time and definitely not enough words to encompass it all, but I will say that learning to balance my commitment and responsibilities to my practice, to my family, and to my body and self is a work in progress day to day, which humbles me and rewards me. I am very grateful for my family.
SWC: What are you working on in 2022? What are you looking forward to?
MS: I have a few solo exhibitions lined up for the next few years that I am really looking forward to working on that involve more sculptural and textile elements alongside my painting and drawing practice. I am very excited to see how my practice will continue to evolve and progress with all the new changes that lie ahead, and I hope for a year that favours love and care among us.
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