Sorceress: The magic of art
For her “paroxysmal” second solo exhibit, “SORCERESS,” which runs till Aug. 30 at the Crucible Gallery at SM Megamall, Katya Angara is casting a spell. Katya says she is “on a quest to remember the way home” to herself after “peregrine years in the labyrinth” of her inner world.
Intrigued by the introduction to her exhibit, I asked her exactly what she meant by being “on a quest to remember the way home?”
“Art making has always been a process of self-exploration and an attempt to understand myself better. It’s my way of coming to terms with lifelong struggles with loneliness, and feeling mentally and emotionally isolated from people. Like the feeling of being in another world outside looking in through the glass, but not being able to enter,” Katya, the third child of the late Sen. Edgardo J. Angara and Gloria Manalang Angara, told me in an interview.
“The painful experiences necessary for growth have taught me that if you wander in the wilderness long enough, you end up circling back to yourself,” she elaborated. “I lived almost 15 years in London, had my (mis)adventures, then came back to be with my father, who passed away a few years after.”
“The writer and philosopher Joseph Campbell talks about The Hero’s Journey wherein as heroes of our own stories, we go through various trials, we slay (or learn to fly!) with our dragons in order to learn and embrace who we are, and what we are here to accomplish,” she added.
“I learned that so often what we run away from is where we need to be. I thought I could make an exciting life for myself in London, but as life is, things didn’t go according to plan. So, I came home to Manila and, ever so slowly, things clicked into place like pieces on a chessboard,” Katya, younger sister of Education Secretary Sonny Angara, recalled.
Katya said she was diagnosed some years ago as being on the autistic spectrum with ADHD. She described the diagnosis as “cathartic, because it aligned with many of the eccentricities that I had been feeling about myself all my life. Never feeling like I fit in anywhere.”
“After my diagnosis, I learned to love myself again and accept my strangeness and preference for solitude,” she confided.
Katya uses myths and metaphors to make sense of the “blood and beauty of existence.” The opening chapter is a “grimoire”—like a textbook of magic and witchcraft.
“Each moon-shaped canvas is a mirror reflecting the evanescent cycles of life, whether fecund or fallow. The round canvases represent the Taoist principle of wholeness as well as Jungian circumambulation (circling around the self), wherein every artwork is a magic spell, calling the eternal from within our collective unconscious. Shadows from the abyss are summoned, named, and integrated. As above, so below; as within, so without,” Katya said.
The closing chapter contains imagery of transmutation and transcendence through “sacred sexuality.”
“Erotic power is power,” the artist emphasized. “Power is not created nor destroyed, only transformed. Winged familiars fly the artist into the liminal spaces between (sexual) awakening and dreaming. These psychopomps (a creature, spirit, angel, deity, or shaman whose responsibility is to escort newly deceased souls from the earthly realm to the afterlife) are immortalized with their totemic ‘Sorceress,’ the centerpiece of the exhibit.”
Black, red, and white symbolize the process of life-death-rebirth. For Katya, the sorceress is a rebel—perhaps like she is.
“She is the feral and ancient child, the singer of the body electric, the Scorpio-turned-Phoenix,” pointed out Katya, a Scorpio.
“The road ahead is long, but I celebrate my growth and the small triumphs along the way. And I enjoy living in the present moment!” declared Katya.
Yes, I believe Katya has cast a spell on herself—leading to wondrous new triumphs, and it’s pure magic for and from her.
