Earthbound

The Art Newspaper published an opinion piece last January 2025 in response to the catastrophic California wildfires. Janelle Zara wrote that the fires “brought the threat of climate change out of the distant future and set it before us, transforming the hypothetical into a clear and present danger. Those of us who hadn’t grasped the urgency of the situation had our minds changed overnight.”

The exigency to address climate emergency has become increasingly purposeful in the work of artists and eco-literature writers who wish to stimulate more dialogue on new ways forward, challenging existing systems. Unnatural heat waves, severe winter storms, destructive hurricanes, and in the Philippines, super typhoons and massive flooding have become seasonal realities rather than exceptions. Artists have embraced the role of reducing environmental impact, encouraging audiences to take concrete steps, beginning with themselves.

For the exhibit Earthbound, Geraldine Javier, Marionne Contreras, and Steffi Cua worked with natural dyes and ecoprints to create tapestries, clothing, and sculptural objects as a sustainable approach to artmaking. Arranged as an immersive installation, the show invites audiences to engage by navigating a space that brings them closer to nature. The artists educate visitors by showing the possibilities of printing with different botanicals using techniques that they can explore at home.  

Ecoprinting is a natural dyeing technique that uses plants to create patterns and colors on fabric. Javier’s studio in Batangas, surrounded by gardens and a small farm, was the ideal environment for trials in ecoprinting. She began experimenting during the pandemic and expanded her processes in preparation for a 2023 solo presentation at Silverlens Manila. Since then, her work has evolved to include more scientific methods. Her goal is to discover and document the printing effects of all plants local to the Philippines. She has observed, for example, that Talisay leaves are rich in tannins, producing vibrant, more colorfast dyes. Red banaba leaves, when used for printing, form a constellation of dots with younger leaves, and more defined stripes with older leaves. 

Javier’s work for Earthbound are four tapestries representing the four seasons. These are ecoprinted, patchworked and embroidered based on the colors, plants and animals active during each season. The winter tapestry is treated using an additional technique called iron blanket, which involves placing a layer of cloth soaked in iron solution on top of the target fabric piece so that the blanket reacts with the tannins in the plant materials. Javier discerns, “The seasons are now so mixed-up because of climate change. In the not-so-distant future, the next generation may no longer experience seasons during their expected time frames.”

A visit to her hometown Bicol prompted Marionne Contreras to forage, with the help of her young children, by the banks of a river near home. Her methods, intentionally raw, was much like camping. She wrapped and bundled cloth around collected twigs and steamed them over her mother’s old caldero, using charcoal for the fire. 

Contreras continued exploring this technique at the Rimbun Dahan Residency in Malaysia, where she foraged endemic plants within a forest. She traced the lineage of these plants, parallel to her efforts in tracing her own family lineage. Her most poignant discovery was that plants from the same family would print with similar effects. Back in the Philippines, she foraged in a forest in Alfonso, Cavite, attempting berries, wild weeds and other invasive species. 

A trial with fallen mahogany leaves produced beautiful, saturated oranges. This led Contreras to further investigate the history and implication of the mahogany plant, an invasive species introduced to the Philippines during the period of American colonization.  A Philippine mahogany forest is creepily silent, devoid of sounds from chirping birds and insects. Mahogany has an allelopathic effect on the environment, meaning it produces chemicals that inhibit the growth of surrounding vegetation, hence killing biodiversity. Even more alarming is mahogany’s detrimental effects on native Philippine tree species, including the country’s national tree, narra.

Continuing an idea from the artist’s recent solo presentation Sympathy for the Mahogany, Contreras contemplates on “societal expectations for organisms and life to thrive even in foreign and unfamiliar territories.”  These impositions on displaced plants mirror the encumbrance felt by displaced humans, who lose their sense of belonging and thus, the value of their existence. In addition to ecoprints, Contreras collects found twigs and forms them into triangular totems, a metaphor for the psychological need to be seen, heard and understood. Wrapped with ecoprinted fabric, they are “like dressing a cow in a leather suit”, a play on the futility of human effort to imitate nature. While unnecessary, redundant and self-indulgently human, it also portrays nature as going full circle, going back to itself.

The empowering of oneself begins with Contreras’ inclination of making her own fabrics in which ecoprints are the base. She then cuts, reassembles and sews the pieces, abstracting them into tapestries with more open narratives.

The importance of narrative is likewise a consideration for Steffi Cua, founder and creative director of Idyllic Summers, an ethical brand centered on people and craft. After studying and training at various fashion schools in London, she worked in the womenswear buying offices at Harrods. During her term there, she was exposed to the excess and ethical concerns of fast fashion. 

The volume of clothing being produced today, around 100 billion garments made annually worldwide, has gone beyond planetary limitations. Fast fashion has grown even faster, with seasonal collections shifting to continuous “drops”—new items that fulfill the unsatiable need for newness, an attitude accelerated by social media’s shortening of viewers’ attention span. The call for slow fashion is becoming more urgent, specifically the advocacy for degrowth in the fashion industry. Degrowth is the latest buzzword referring to a managed reduction in both how we consume and how we produce. It involves regenerative agriculture, repairs, recycling, upcycling and localism among other things. 

The exigency for a degrowth movement lured Cua back to the Philippines to build a more people-centered social enterprise. She works with local artisans and indigenous peoples to highlight craftsmanship and heritage, supporting Filipino-owned small businesses, NGO’s and co-ops. 

Cua takes a step further for Earthbound by using fabrics ecoprinted by Javier and Contreras to create 25 distinct looks, a total of 80 pieces for the show. The collection consists of circle-based patterns inspired by the progression of a seed that germinates into a flower and eventually wilts and dies. The patterns’ petal-like contours are cut with the motive for zero waste or having as little leftover fabric as possible. They also reflect the earth’s shape and nature’s cyclicality. Part of the work is how the fabric transforms during the clothing’s time with its wearer. Its prints and colors may fade, but wearers can safely dye and print again, if they teach themselves how. 

Javier, Contreras and Cua have taken insight from See All This, a magazine issue curated by trend forecaster Li Edelkoort. Edelkoort reminds us that while the fashion industry is struggling to innovate, the solution is with you and me—to look at our wardrobes differently and take care of it: “A simple way to break free from the cycle of fast fashion is to rediscover garments already in our possession and appreciate them in a different way, prolonging their longevity”.

Ecodyeing is an easily self-taught process that empowers more mindful consumers. Synthetic textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of water. Leftover dyed water is often dumped in ditches, streams and rivers—aquatic sources for the entire ecosystem, ultimately impacting humans. These dye effluents disrupt the growth and reproduction of marine organisms, enter the human food chain and contaminate drinking water.  Yet dye pollution is only one of out the many ways fast fashion damages the planet. Greenpeace has reported the public health disaster in Ghana where countries from the Global North have shipped and dumped mountains of synthetic clothes waste on its beaches. To reduce this unmanageable clothing waste, they are burned, releasing toxic gases into the air

The artists’ research guided them to contemplate on clothing as a tangible expression of culture, tradition and social identity. Since antiquity, clothing has been a means of communicating beliefs, values, gender roles, and other aspects of cultural heritage; it is an object that represents the wearer to the world. Clothes in our wardrobe also reflect personal narratives that shift over time, from birth to various rites of passage throughout our life stages, much like a visual autobiography, and comparable to an artist’s work reflecting their current situations and ideals. 

Javier summarizes, “The title Earthbound refers to our connection to the soil and our use of natural materials that can safely be returned to the earth. The show presents the ways we cope and deal with our anxieties over environmental crisis. It is a form of recovering and reconnecting, fully embracing what nature has given us. By surrounding ourselves with these artworks and by wearing the clothes, we are reminded of that connection.”

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By Stephanie Frondoso

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