by Ursula Handleigh (Ontario College of Art & Design University)
Fig. 1. Ursula Handleigh, Terno. Image courtesy of the Artist.
There were two homes I wish I could have visited: the home of my grandparents, where my mother was born and the home of my great-grandparents, where my grandmother was born. These sites were a throughline for connection and a touchpoint across all stories I heard about my family prior to their migration to Canada. I traced these sites in my mind’s eye many times over. I listened to stories of place, marked timelines of events, sketched out their exteriors, mapped out floor plans, and looked for photographs that were never taken. I searched for answers I came to accept I’d never find. I was on a quest for deeper knowing, but I was always left with blanks, unaccounted spaces, missing memories, and gaps in time.
Both these homes are now gone; gutted and lost from the family. From my grandmother’s home, only a suggestion of the original structure is left standing; from her mother’s home, only a patchwork of uneven soil on a plot of land exists. The voids are palpable at each site. These desolate landscapes were a steep departure from stories I held of these spaces, stories that keep these homes alive in my mind and body.
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Growing up in the diaspora, I was immersed in Filipino culture but direct encounters with the Philippines always felt just beyond my grasp. The identity I developed as a Filipina were informed by oral histories that were passed down to me, the value of kapwa, how we support one another and care for others, I absorbed traditions to carry forward and the lightness that bahala na can bring. I learned resilience and the skill of adapting. We shared stories around the table, read by the light of the capiz lamps, walked through shell curtained doorways, filled our bellies with pasalubong, and navigated around the rotating balikbayan boxes that sat in the corner of our living room in Canada, a continuous reminder that our homeland was elsewhere.
Fig. 2. Ursula Handleigh, Sewing Sleeves. Film Stills. Images courtesy of the Artist.
My art practice became a place for connection. I embraced the process of research to honour those that came before me, to continue their cultural practices, to understand our histories and our lands. I took on ways of working and making so that I could embody the gestures of my ancestors: weaving pandan leaves as my grandmother did, sewing stitches into fabric as my mother did. I used materials that were embedded in our histories: milk from the carabao, leaves from the banana tree, fibres from the pineapple plant and intertwined them with materials accessible to me in Toronto. Embodied gesture was a way for me to share in a tactile experience with people who are no longer with me and kin whom I never met.
Fig. 3 - 4. Ursula Handleigh. Banig. (Left: Detail). Images courtesy of the Artist.
Fig. 5. Ursula Handleigh, Banig. Image courtesy of the Artist.
My first visit to the Philippines was long overdue. I set out to travel to San Ildefonso, Bulacan to make the walk from my family’s ancestral home to their farmland with my mother, a walk she would have done regularly when she was living in the Philippines. We had done this walk together once before, just two years prior. Living in different provinces, my mother and I spoke over the phone as she recalled memories of walking the roads that took her to the open fields where their bahay kubo sat. As she narrated, I navigated the same walk through google maps. Walking at her pace, I passed the landmarks she described and took the turns she directed; across generations, across memory and place, we walked together.
I have always been searching for deeper connection to my family and our culture, looking back in time to trace my roots, to find the line of family I came from. I came from a line of strong women, and can only imagine the strength of those women that came before. An untraceable maternal line that ends at current memory as there are no known names or records of past family members beyond those that have already been met. I grew up longing to visit the Philippines to get closer, closer to our ancestors and our histories. I wanted a place to (re)connect. As the years passed, I had reservations, hearing from others who had done the same pilgrimage that it was emotionally painful, that a trip to the Philippines would only highlight the distance I already felt.
Leaving at dawn while the sun was still low, my mother and I walked the two blocks from where we were staying to my family’s plot of land. Approaching where the home once was, I hear a voice as I walk past, “Ursula, you’ve grown-up so much”. My mother and I both turned around in wonder and shock as the women who owned the sari-sari store next door continued, “your grandmother always shared stories about you when she visited”. My grandmother had Alzheimer’s for most of my life. She started losing her memories when I was 5, a year after my grandfather died. She was the matriarch of my family and the only grandparent I carry memories of. Our consciousness seemed to pass each other like ships in the night. As I began creating my own memories, she began losing hers. By the time I grew to have questions I wanted to ask her, the answers had already slipped away. Standing on the same ground, more than 30 years later and half way across the world, our consciousness found each other as I shared in a conversation with my grandmother.
Fig. 6 - 8. Exhibition view, As Far As Maps Will Take Us. 2022. Ursula Handleigh. Top (Detail: Farm); Middle (Detail: House).
Images courtesy of the Artist.
We didn’t make it to the farm that day as originally planned, instead neighbours pulled up chairs and I shared in almusal next to the plot of land where my family once lived. I received gifts in the form stories from passersby who shared their memories of my grandmother, the home she kept where the doors were always open, the school down the road that she helped to start, and the absence left when she and her family moved away. I was given gifts in the form of memories, those left by my grandmother and carried to me through the community. I thought I travelled to the Philippines in search for connection. What I came to realize was I didn’t need to search at all, the memories were there waiting for me, left by my ancestors and held for safe keeping by the land and its people.
May 2024
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