“You’re only here for a short visit. Don’t hurry, don’t worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way.” — Walter Hagen

Typical response to being chronically online. “Touch some grass,” often used derisively to indicate a person’s detachment from reality, is turned on its head, with Tee’s sentiment of making this moment of disengagement precious.

Faithful to her ethos as an artist, Tee embraces the deliberate act of slowing down and savoring the process of discovery and reflection. Taking a break from painting, her process here required stepping out into nature, engaging in new activities, and opening herself up to new experiences. Tee gathered snapshots of quiet scenery, from nature, in contrast to the world in turmoil and the incessant exposure to the ails of the world from doomscrolling.

In a short visit, Tee has frozen these quiet scenes from nature using acrylic photo transfer. The act of taking photographs, selecting them, and memorializing these tiny monuments to daily life on a blank surface. These scenes are populated with foliage, embellished and stitched over by hand. Needlework requires putting a pause on the busyness of life, calling for disengagement and focused work. Tee’s process is, in a way, a forced meditation, providing a brief escape from a fast-moving world.

Complementing the organic shapes of these stitches that bear the gestures of the artist’s hands are the imperfect recapturing of these photo transfers, which create a formalized and fragmented grid structure.

Tee’s new body of work is an autobiographical geography of the spaces she traversed, as well as a peek into the spaces other bodies have occupied.  “The Flowers Along the Way I and II”, “More Flowers Along the Way,” and “For a Little While” feature images that were taken on her walks in UP Diliman, which is one of the few nature reserves close to her home that provides a retreat for Tee. Depicting flower bushes sprawling over the fence, “The Flowers Along the Way I and II” — the titular pieces of this show — opens the images up to textile flowers and thread.

“For a Little While” postures as a window overlooking a view. An incidental shot, this piece features a larger view of the sun shining through the trees rather than the initial planned subject of the kapok trees in the campus. As though looking through weathered glass, we see only a partial view of the image, illuminated by the sun’s focused gaze.

Although these moments can seem solitary and isolated, sharing photographs leads to seeing friends’ interior lives and looking at the world through their eyes. “Golden (After Julia Barrameda)” was created after an image shot by Tee’s very close friend, Julia, on a road trip she had taken along the Pacific West Coast. The image is a reflection of how Tee views her friend — “a ray of sunshine during a rainy or any type of day” — who loves the outdoors and possesses a fascination with light.

Similarly, “Lush (After Kitty Kaburo)” is a way of seeing a view that was experienced by someone else. This image was created after the view from the hospital lobby that another one of Tee’s friends, Kitty, witnessed while accompanying her mother. She had said that the view had made staying in the hospital more bearable, and that it was a fun sight to see.

There is no denying that the world as we know it is in disarray, and there is no real escape from it. Taking brief pauses to appreciate the small moments that make life beautiful, however, is often a much needed reminder of what makes life so precious and special. With a short visit, Tee provides us with a bit of reprieve from the external chaos; a respite where we are moved to touch some grass and maybe find flowers to smell along the way.

— Carina Santos