Philippines

Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig situates a spatial system of paintings, videos and sculptures to form an abstracted horizon embedded with an oceanic love story told from four perspectives: the sailor, his mother, his lover, and the sea of echoes. Immersive and buoyed by light, sound and reflection, Jon Cuyson’s installation channels the lives and longings of the seafarer, his family, ships and molluscs to centre and humanise the Philippine labour that fuels the waterways of global commerce. Under-recognised yet always present, the Filipino seafarer is not unlike the humble mussel: resilient, and enduring endless flows of water.

Mussels also hold the memory of the oceans within their very forms, filtering, clustering and creating new life in the process.

Cuyson’s project explores mussels as a motif, method and metaphor for understanding kinship across land and sea with a creative practice that circulates, clings and gathers. Rooted in queer and post-colonial ecologies, the artist’s memory modules are envisioned as a body at sea, a vessel with portals and skin-surfaces connecting submerged histories, maritime labour and fragments of belonging.