. . . is an interdisciplinary visual designer and researcher interested in exploring cultural ownership, binaries, and systems in and through graphics, design, publications, and physical media.
Email and Instagram
. . . is an interdisciplinary visual designer and researcher interested in exploring cultural ownership, binaries, and systems in and through graphics, design, publications, and physical media.
Email and Instagram
14.5 x 19.6cm
Printed and bound at CSM Publications
Hand-cut and trimmed postcards
Colorplan 250GSM and Transclear 150GSM
Printed at CSM Digital Print
Collection by She Carmona
Words by Daisy Redfern
- Birthday Card exchanged between parents, 11th April 2008
The windows in Filipino cars are tinted blue. Squinting. Skimming. This is the veil between spectator and participant, the safari kart, the distorted lens that reads: Please keep your limbs inside the vehicle at all times.
My Home in Paraiso is a reconciliation between Paraiso, a coastal Filipino barangay and Clifton, Nottingham, She Carmona’s second home, after 14 years estranged. Through documenting their homecoming trip in found materials and film photographs while continuing to explore the technology that fostered early 21st-century migrant connection, Carmona has retraced the steps that had been left untrodden.
Uniforms indicate an identity; one that is often and easily flattened; misconstrued as definitive. It is not the uniform but the viewer that neglects the flux, the ironies of meritocracy and the blur of what we deem as “official”. The uniforms of a nurse, a policeman, a soldier, a basketball player, a “typical” British citizen and a prospering migrant; Carmona’s family wear all of these at once. Each of the six looks pays homage to found familial uniforms, and their codes that suddenly switch upon becoming a UK resident. Styled with a distinctly Swagapino edge, Carmona honours an attitude borne from contradictions that were once mutually exclusive; Google Earth street-style and Facebook steeze. Proud iPad kids grinning into loading screens.
Crude materials from Paraiso’s beaches are interwoven with nylons and Dri-Pro provided by sailing company Henri Lloyd. Hand-cut drapes emulate bark peeling from a wise trunk, layers overlapping as they fray, delicately paperish and yet defiant of gravity. Fishing remnants, scraps, stubs. A part or quantity that is left after the greater part has been used, removed, or destroyed. Codified symbols become increasingly shredded. There is a gulf between longing and reality.
In She Carmona’s BA Graduate collection, these tensions between aspirational and occupational identities; between home and Home, unfold across the body.
[Ongoing Experimentation]