plagued by longing begins with my father — his near-death experience, the memory loss that followed, and the daily realities of living alongside his dementia. Caring for him became a way of asking larger questions: what do we inherit, and what gets lost? Where does belonging begin?

From there, the work expands into history. Tracing my father's lineage back to his grandfather, Don Prudencio Garcia — a general in Davao documented at the transition from Spanish to American colonial rule in the Philippines — the series locates a possible origin point of Filipino American identity in my own family line. The archive is fragmentary, shaped by empire. So is memory.

The work begins with family photographs brought into contact with historical images, including those of Don Prudencio and his family. In some works, I etch directly into the surface — tracing and disrupting the source images, carving as a way of physically engaging the photograph. These marks are not exact translations but partial records, shaped by slippage, pressure, and interruption. In others, I isolate enlarged sections of photographs until the image becomes unstable, opening space for interpretation rather than relying on a fixed or complete view. These surfaces become the foundation for layered compositions of resin, pigment, and embedded photographs. Necklace chains run through and across the work — materials I return to across series as a way of thinking about inheritance: the object passed down from a loved one, the tether to a person or ancestor, the relationship held in all its tangled iterations. Chains adorn and restrain at once, and that complication feels central here, where what is carried across generations is never only one thing.

Color plays a critical role. Rather than describing the image, color activates it — saturated fields of blue, red, green, and amber pooling, bleeding, and clouding over embedded imagery. Color becomes a method for locating potential within the murkiness of lost or fragmented histories, holding space for what cannot be fully resolved or recovered.

plagued by longing transforms intimate family histories into expanded visual records, asking how memory, identity, and belonging are shaped across generations by both care and empire.