About the Artwork
In This Is the Land That Grows Around Me, I altered found images of sand-extracted sites. Land extraction is quite a common practice in third-world southeast asian countries where raw material, like sand or soil, are taken out by the tons to meet the insatiable demand of the global building boom. As the world’s major cities grow larger, natural habitats, like our own beaches and forests, are reduced to barren holes in the ground.
About the Artist
Jem Magbanua earned her degree in Fine Arts from the LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore, First Class and is a recipient of the 2013 Winston Oh Travel Award. She had
completed several artist residences in Japan including the Itonami Air Program, Daisen Animation Project, and Studio Kura. Her work has been exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions in the Philippines, United States, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore.
ARTIST STATEMENT – Grounded firmly in the practice of drawing, Jem Magbanua’s work explores the nature of place, of human beings in place, and of the structures- organic and artificial- that shape (human) nature. Under these themes, ‘motion’ plays a huge role in the way the work is composed- whether it be the cyclic movements of nature or the way the body and mind navigate space. Within her drawings and paintings, she limns landscapes that lie between the mental and the physical where structural space converges with the realm of intangible memories embedded within those spaces.
