Patricia Perez Eustaquio (UWC Adriatic 1995-1997) is a visual artist currently living and working in Manila, Philippines, her home country. She is not limited to one medium and creates paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations. She has had solo shows in Manila, Taiwan, Singapore, and New York, and has been part of several notable group exhibitions including shows at the Hong Kong Art Centre (HKAC) and the Singapore Art Museum. We had a chat with her about her work in the arts and her UWC experience.

“I am a visual artist. I make both two-dimensional and sculptural objects. In fact, I paint a lot, but I approach paintings from a sculptural point of view, as objects in themselves, rather than just gestures on a canvas. My canvases are mostly shaped, almost decorative, alluding to fragments of a painting, of a narrative. I mostly work with these ideas, of fragments and traces, detritus and debris, exploring our relationship with objects.

I have always been interested in the language of art: how it conveys ideas and feelings, how combining two or three ideas can produce a complex host of references and memories, and how they can change how we perceive things or cast them in a different light. It is interesting how one thing, one object, can be viewed and understood in so many different ways, and I suppose this is why I am always engaged, interested or curious: there are just so many possibilities to explore, it's impossible to exhaust them all.

I am deeply interested in many things, but what consumes most of my life is making things, or thinking of things to make or design. It's always challenging to pick up one thing and try to determine how best to manipulate it to convey the idea you'd like to convey. It's not always successful. In fact, most of the times it is not - which is why I have to keep trying.

Thinking back to my UWC experience, I can say that UWC's impact on my life and on my way of thinking is so all encompassing that it's difficult to know where to begin. UWC catches us at a moment when we are just defining ourselves and throws us into an environment that challenges the foundations of what we know and how we think about the world. Going through that made me realise that there are many ways to solve a problem; that viewing something - anything - in a single dimension is the poorest, most tragic way to go about it. I pick up an object and I have to turn it round and round, dissect it, view it under a microscope, really figure it out. Perceiving that object brings with it the object's entire history aside from its physical properties. And I suppose that's what brought me to the arts, because on some level art is an abstract, visual (and otherwise) experience of this scrutinising, of how we perceive things”.

For more information please visit Patricia’s website www.patriciaeustaquio.com and her gallery websites www.silverlensgalleries.com and www.trfineart.com

You may also enjoy reading this recent feature by CNN Philippines.