Most of the work that comprises Carina Santos’ Here as Elsewhere were made during her month-long visit to Quezon City, both a long-awaited homecoming and a necessary step to procuring her visa to stay in the U.K. After finishing a postgraduate degree in London, Santos tried to find a way to stay in a place that felt like it was not finished with her yet. And, in the process of waiting, this show came to be. In many ways, Here as Elsewhere is about transitions and that liminal space where home is both “here” and “not here,” where your body does not quite connect with the space you inhabit, but neither does it, entirely, to the space it has left.

Through a series of landscapes, mainly oil painted on a woven surface, Santos expresses the unease of unbelonging and of the distance both physical and emotional, with the work going for visual and thematic consistency. Here, however, there is an underlying tumult of a heart working in overdrive, with no time or capacity to pause and consider what these swirl of feelings might really mean. It is about the inherited sense of home and the deliberate making of one in a place that is so far removed from all that you have known, by building a landscape of feeling around what you already have and what you wish to gain.