Marigold Santos is a storyteller. Informed by her own personal narrative of diaspora, Santos explores her hybrid Filipinx-Canadian identity, and the landscapes of her memories through paint and tattoos. A central theme in Santos’s work is the story of the asuang, a mythological creature from Philippine folklore. Once a powerful medicine woman, and matriarchal figure in Indigenous tribal societies, the asuang was demonized by Spanish colonizers. She became a wild sorceress who could self-fragment and disappear into the night. With a nod to the hardening experience of immigration and the subsequent feeling of existing in two places at once, the asuang has become Santos’s main protagonist.
