Flight into the Wilderness

Visitant by Is Jumalon

Is Jumalon remembers her connections to specific pockets of nature because she instinctively seeks it. Whether it be the rivers of Zamboanga, the mountains of Negros Oriental, or even groves of trees near the place she now resides in Metro Manila; her attraction to such places is not aesthetic, but restorative. To Is such holdings of the natural world, though they may lie outside the sprawl of streetlights and subdivisions, nevertheless feel like habitats in that they nourish something in the occasional human visitor.

The works in this current exhibit draw from her motive to slip away from the confines of civilized company and flee towards nature, to rest and “require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild.” It is her attempt to snatch fragments from all the places she once haunted, refined into specific patterns. And though the images Is Jumalon conjures up retain a semblance of their restorative value, she has chosen to accentuate mystery and uncertainty over tranquility.

Once the haunter herself, the artist now conveys the same quality to her works. These depictions of nature seem like apparitions: monochromatic, dream-like, unpredictable, their size towering over the viewer’s head. It presents a reproduction of the usual perceived stillness of the natural world as a more active and restless force. More a reflection of the numerous disparate details within the woodland experience, the paintings are a patchwork of light and leaf, twine and twig that extend further than what we see in the frame, blocking all line of sight so we see only what is before us: the stark beauty of flora. Dynamic textures, expressive linework, and vertical scale are all employed to contribute an almost tangible effect of being in the presence of something that is, as we quoted from our woodsman Henry Thoreau, “indefinitely wild”.

Created a few months before exhibition, Visitant is almost certainly a product of a synthesis between the desire for flight into nature and the uncertainty and fear such a traverse assumes. It considers as context the current pandemic that enforced a more limited geographical radii into our lives. It is in these circumstances that we, and indeed the artist, experience more keenly both the distress of being chained and the danger of being freed—a potent brew that birthed this mysterious landscape of looming branch and leaf.

Such needed wildness, after hours upon hours we spend inside walls and well-ordered routines, has turned the visited into the visitant. Is Jumalon’s wilderness is now upon us, a revenant of both her longing to be exiled and her uncertainty of what she might find after all of this has come to pass.

 –Bendix Fernandez