29.2 x 14.6 cm
The circle is an old idea:
sun, orbit, mouth, wound
To cast one is to believe
something can be held together
without edges.
And thus,
a ring is a small horizon,
promising
that silver might remember the hand that
shaped it;
A sharpened edge holds a trembling dot.
-Holly Eddington
Telescopic Realities, Kaleidoscope Dreams belongs to ‘Pilgrimage’: an ongoing collaborative project between Jessica Dorizac and Miguel Aquilizan. Pilgrimage is a journey that reveals where the duo have come from, where they are situated, and where they are heading, jointly constructing art and lives between Australia and the Philippines. As such, “Pilgrimage” is a title and methodology, exploring migration, movement, and the material narratives that emerge between cultures.
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Dorizac and Aquilizan’s collaboration began in 2018 through a process of play and improvisation while working from a makeshift home after moving to the Philippines. As their space filled with materials gathered from pluralistic cultural contexts, they began to notice incidental tableaus that served as archives of movement and exchange. Pilgrimage evolved herein into a sustained exploration of shared authorship and culturally embedded materiality through assemblage.
Each wearable sculpture of telescopic realities, kaleidoscopic dreams seems to depict a microcosmic encounter, a rendezvous of two archetypal characters reincarnated in the raw and the refined, the abject and the elegant, the foreign and the familiar. In a distilled choreography of contact, one becomes two, yet two remain distinct.
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Dorizac and Aquilizan’s collaboration is grounded in a shared veneration for the material world where objects are understood as carriers of memory, labour, and lived experience. Dorizac’s work draws on collage, pattern, and spatial assemblage, often informed by her architectural surroundings. She meticulously manipulates shape, space and colour to produce a unique and culturally encoded visual language. Aquilizan’s sculptural practice is a process of retrieval, salvaging and recontextualising abandoned materials through his work as an estate cleaner. These objects are reassembled into sculptural memento moris that remind us of the precarity of place and possession.
As wearable objects, the rings extend this dialogue onto the body. The circular is a mark of unity and promise, yet here, perhaps it also signifies repetition and reuse in the cyclical movement of materials across contexts. Resisting polished glamour, each object’s tactile interplay invites both attraction and discomfort, experimenting with a preciousness that is faintly abject. The wearer bears witness to a secret alchemical play in which value is reconfigured before them.
A telescopic reality refracts into a kaleidoscope dream.
〜 Holly Eddington