Marigold Santos fluid shroud (rosal in strata), 50,8 × 50,8 cm, 2020.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Norberg Hall, Calgary

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.

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This article also appears in the issue 102 - (Re)seeing Painting
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