In the House Her Father Left

The need for shelter is a basic human need, a basic right. Humans have come a long way from cave dwellings, and what we have come to call a house has also evolved in ways we have yet to discover.

As a child, Marionne Contreras lived in a house her father built for their family in the lot where her grandmother’s house also stood. Her father set out to build a space of their own in the middle of everything that wasn’t theirs. And so rose a DIY patchwork of wooden walls, part galvanized iron, part nipa roof, and a quaint turquoise interior with a shocking pink exterior. Within its small confines, a child would still experience a wide open space with a treasure trove of contents and inhabitants, and only in hindsight, or a belated reunion with it, does one actually gauge its true smallness.

The immediate environment provided a myriad of experiences. There was an abundant cover of allamandas – a flowering vine – covering the fences, and there was a significant presence of orchids which were tended to by her grandmother. Somewhere on the grounds, dragonflies frequented, and in youthful folly, the artist and her sister would make attempts for them to stay, including clipping their wings which eventually led to their death.

In our minds, there are pockets of memories that float in and out. Photographs portraying a little child clutching dolls or wearing mismatched slippers inspire a “self-portrait”—but if you only remember the photograph and not the events in it, where does the memory lie? If you only remember a person sharing a moment with you in a photograph, do you really remember that person’s presence? Most of the time, a house outlives its inhabitants, but traces remain in its edges, its walls. By the door, on the floor, there are coins laid out – for “good luck” – such a variety of superstitions people live by. People live their own lives before being the inhabitants of a house. Prior to being a mother, to being a wife, she was a woman who gathered souvenirs from her travels, one of which was a relief of two horses that she kept displayed above the door. Among the orchids, a puddle that would somehow never dry up had become a breeding ground for mosquitoes that the children were always reminded to stay clear of. In a way, some memories persist, and the bad memories that come with them are on autoplay.

Later viewers as we are, what we are presented is not a recreation of a scene. Swathes of almost Fauvian color choices draw out the sensations of those moments in the past. The days, the time of day, these memories are not signified as physical reconstructions but as portents of memory. It is not what the artist saw but what she felt, that is the driving force of these creations. There may be no such thing as pure memory, as we all tend to remember what stood out to us the most. As the originals collapse, fall into decay, what we remember also changes. Some things become more important than others which used to be. What we are presented then is not a recreation of a scene, but the preservation of a memory—of a safe space. 

A small tree used to grow by the house her father built. The house has faded significantly. Its pink has dulled, its turquoise interior mostly gone. The orchids have mostly disappeared. What persists is the memory of these colors that would intuitively find themselves in the artist’s palette. Yet here, the splashes of color, the bright popping hues strewn all over the walls and patches of yarn and a patchwork house are all what the artist wants you to see. Call it vanity, but this is about her as an artist. Taking off from a memory of her own, she transmutes process and material into a collection of objects that memorializes herself as the artist. These are her choices, her actions, her safe space that is being shared with us. So then is this house really what her father built? 

There are these idioms that describe parents in a household: the father is the “haligi ng tahanan,” and the mother is the “ilaw ng tahanan.” Timeless as they sound, they no longer represent a singular truth. Moreover, considering scientific knowledge on how humans – male, female, or any gender – are largely of their mother’s cellular material—she, the mother, is akin to a house. A house is generally defined by having rooms. Sometimes everything is in one space, at times there is a dedicated room for anything and everything. Such is the artist. Her own body is a house, one that stands apart from its surroundings, apart from her inhabitants. Like any person, she is her own, with her dreams, desires, goals, and decisions.  

Like a house with its rooms – compartmentalized – woman, mother, artist in separate rooms. Eventually, they are under one roof. The house that a mother builds is herself. Someday her children will remember her as they remember the house they grew up in. In what manner, only time will reveal.