Marigold Santos is the 2025 Koerner Artist-in-Residence in Queen’s BFA (Visual Art) Program.
Fragments Gathered; on diaspora, motherwork, and gaiety within the work of Marigold Santos
Santos explores ideas of self-hood that embrace multiplicity, hybridity and transformation through a reflection of movement, migration and change, while considering the fragmented yet empowering relationships to heritage. Immigrating to Canada from the Philippines at a young age serves as a departure point for her considerations regarding identity, belongingness, discrimination and oppression, as well as the tether to a culture and ancestry graspable only through enactments of memory.
The images in her work negotiate narratives of the past and present through a diasporic lens and result in the creation of a personal myth–a visual vocabulary influenced by the Filipino and Western folktales of her early youth, sensorial connections via taste, smell and texture, Filipino traditions both commonplace and revered, and the geography and landscape of both her homeland and present environments real or imagined. Like the woven textures continuously present in her work, she will speak of the intersection between self-awareness and the celebration of plural identities, connection and community, labour, vulnerability, and care, which all come together to represent the lived experience as multifarious and influx and become necessary within a structure of resilience and repair.
Marigold Santos, shroud bathypelagic visage (vampyroteuthis infernalis), 2024, acrylic, pigment, gesso on canvas. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Marigold Santos pursues an inter-disciplinary art practice that includes painting, drawing, sculpture, tattoo, and sound. Her work examines notions of heritage, folklore, motherwork, and decolonization, and are presented within the otherworldly. Her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and tattoo work explores self-hood and identity that embraces multiplicity, fragmentation and empowerment, as informed by diasporic experiences. She holds a BFA from the University of Calgary, and an MFA from Concordia University. She is a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, and was long-listed for the prestigious Sobey Art Award in 2023 and 2024. Her recent solo exhibitions include OF ARMOUR BESPOKE, OF FABRIC, OF SKIN, OF WITHIN / BINUBUO NG PASADYANG PROTEKSYON, NG TELA, NG BALAT, AT NG KALOOBAN (2024) at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, the pace and rhythm of time, floating / ang tulin at kumpas ng oras, lumulutang at the Patel Brown Gallery and Southern Alberta Art Gallery (2023), and exhibited her works in her works in the notable Relations – Diaspora and Painting (2020), both at the Fondation Phi in Montreal, with Relations – Diaspora and Painting exhibiting at the Esker Foundation in 2021. Her joint exhibition Efflorescence/The Way We Wake with Rajni Perera is currently on view until April 2025 at Contemporary Calgary. She continues to exhibit widely across Canada and internationally and is represented by Patel Brown Gallery in Toronto and Norberg Hall in Calgary. She maintains an active studio practice and gratefully resides in Treaty 7 Territory, in Mohkinstsis/Calgary.
Portrait of Marigold Santos. Photo: Jared Sych.