a patch, a portrait

Nicole Tee

Blanc Gallery | 9 – 30 May 2026

A kind of intelligence is folded into the presence of accumulated things, perhaps in the creased offcuts left in a drawer, the half-finished project shelved for the time being, or in the cloth passed down from family members. Nicole Tee’s a patch, a portrait begins in these moments, in the sorting and sifting that precedes a move: from Manila to Palawan, and from one chapter to the next.

Patchwork is the exhibition’s central metaphor and method. The technique itself is quite simple. It consists of the joining of smaller pieces to create a larger piece, with every patch becoming useful once again. Working under deliberate constraint (to buy nothing new, to use only what already exists in her collection), Tee utilizes these limitations as a source of her own artistic identity. The works span years. Early prints from college sit alongside new paintings and textile pieces, and certain fabrics resurface across both. It is a movement of continuous revisiting and revising, with scraps of cloth serving as temporal markers before committing its relevance to the present.

Throughout, Tee is drawn to repetition, i.e., the repeated stitch or motif, the modular patterns seemingly designed for newfound variations. But Tee has always seen these repeated gestures as grounded in a kind of aesthetic slowness, resisting the conditions of a world that prizes speed and constant novelty. The acts of sewing and painting function as anchors. It holds her inside the rhythm of making and away from the pull of restlessness.

The domestic runs through everything here. Garments, scarves, quilts, and inherited cloth enter the work as carriers of relationship and transition. But while remaking them into artworks, they remain grounded still on Tee’s specific, lived context. These are her skirts, her aunt’s scarves, her rejected quilt. As such, and as always, the personal opens outward into shared experience.

— JC Rosette