How Lilianna Manahan found beauty and hope in isolation

For Lilianna Manahan, at the peak of her career, a great part of her life was spent outside the confines of her studio. 

If she was not meeting artisans and craftsmen, from bone china potters and indigenous weavers around the Philippines to metalsmiths in New York and glass blowers in Czechoslovakia who would teach her and help bring her ideas to life, she was attending gallery openings in Paris where her work would be exhibited or design shows like the first Maison & Objet Asia, which awarded her as one of the six Rising Asia Talents. 

Back home, she would be creating pieces for gallery exhibitions, the CITEM FAME show, the Art Fair and private clients, when she was not at the beach surfing and gathering ideas for her next project. 

A lockdown must have been nothing short of a nightmare, we told her during a recent conversation. But apparently, it wasn’t so for Lilianna, who has been busy in quarantine, working for her upcoming exhibition.  

“A lot of my projects were cancelled but I was a little relieved,” the artist said, followed by a giggle, betraying the relaxed and cheerful disposition that has carried her through the most trying times.

Her pre-lockdown life was actually just a bit too fast-paced, so the pause was an opportunity to do all the things she had set aside and a chance to go back to drawing.  She had always kept a sketchbook on hand throughout her life, doodling as a child, drawing when she was in school taking her Foundation Studies in Art and Design at Central Saint Martins in London, finishing her BFA Industrial Design degree at the University of the Philippines, and later working in the research and design team of Kenneth Cobonpue in Cebu. 

The visual diary was a record of all her imaginings as she drew plans for functional objects and art pieces that she designed at her studio, where she has been creating for the past nine years. With the pandemic, there was more time to spend with her beloved pen and paper.

“I was looking forward to just observing things, and listening to quiet,” she says, citing Monet as an artist that came to mind — how he was able to observe the same thing at different times of the day.

It was a thought that excited her, bringing her attention to the nuances of the everyday, which we take for granted: The different cloud formations and shades of color at sunset, the colors and sounds that surround us throughout the day, shadows indoors and outdoors and how we respond to them. 

“Even daily routines and habits I formed, how people act — some funny, some unbelievable, and the humor I found in being locked down,” Lilianna recalls.

These would be the starting points for a collection of works that she would call “Unlimited,” her fourth solo exhibition that will open on March 27 at Modeka Art in La Fuerza Plaza in Makati.

“It was going back to basics, drawing to tell stories rather than dictate plans. After all, we had all the time in the world to listen,” according to Lilianna. 

Just as she would see the same thing in many permutations throughout the day, she wanted to do something that would show material in different ways, “with all of them rooting from one source, which were my drawings.”

In the beginning, she just wanted to challenge herself to the limits that she had, with the title and process coming later. Her growing interest in metal and her recent studies in smithing techniques made it the material of choice for the collection, which would showcase its versatility.

For her works on paper, titled “Post Tenebras Lux,” the Latin expression meaning “light after darkness,” she worked in metal leaf, showing the different ways that it can be layered and oxidized, revealing different sheens and lusters depending on which angle you view it from.

They are somehow like pockets of light that Lilianna wants us to see during these difficult times by changing our perspectives: “The longing we have means that this is not all there is and that these glimmers of hope we experience point to a bigger and eternal hope we can look forward to.” 

A similar vein runs through the black iron light sculptures called “Bright Shadows,” which were created around CS Lewis’ “baptism of the imagination” after he read Phantastes by George McDonald.  An essay in the book, “The Romantic Rationalist: God, Life and Imagination in the Work of CS Lewis,” relates how the author, as a boy, experienced “Northernness, a bright shadow, a glimpse of the beauty of another world that awakened a yearning both for that world and for the experience of desiring that world.”

Lilianna relates that “at that time CS Lewis did not know that the bright shadow he was talking about was eternity and the kingdom of God, but it definitely added to his understanding of holiness.”

For Lewis, the world is full of bright shadows but we have to use our imagination to perceive the brightness, “the holy otherness,” in the shadow.