“I’ve always existed in this in-between space—never quite from here or there—and my art became the language I used to make sense of it all.”—Katarina Ortiz
Earlier this year, artist Katarina Ortiz opened Divine Dichotomy at Drawing Room, Manila, a striking exhibition that traced the entanglements of duality—freedom and constraint, heritage and futurity, presence and absence. Through textile-based works and mixed media assemblages, Ortiz invoked the poetics of paradox as a methodology, proposing multiplicity not as something to be resolved but as something to inhabit.
In this conversation with CNTRFLD.ART, Ortiz reflects on the enduring influence of her Filipino Spanish heritage, her years in the UK at Central Saint Martins, and her return to the Philippines—both as a physical act and a chromatic, emotional re-mapping. Speaking with lucid complexity, she discusses the generative contradictions that animate her practice: the hypervisibility of liminality, the aquarium as a metaphor for isolation and systems of care, and the transformative symbolism of coral under duress. At the heart of her work is a commitment to ambiguity as resistance, and a vision of art as a form of epistemic intervention. Spanning identity, diaspora, and postcolonial memory, this dialogue invites readers into Ortiz’s world: one shaped by circularity, dissonance, and an unflinching pursuit of a visual language capacious enough to hold it all.
CNTRFLD.ART — Your Filipino Spanish heritage and experiences growing up have undoubtedly shaped your artistic sensibilities. Can you share how your upbringing influenced your journey to becoming an artist?
Katarina Ortiz — Heritage goes beyond being a static relic; it instead serves as a generative ontology where I attempt to understand and articulate my position in the world. It constitutes a mutable epistemic scaffold, mediating the corporeal while simultaneously inciting a critical introspection into selfhood, affiliation, and the politics of belonging. My positionality emerges from entangled lineages, histories shaped by displacement, migration, globalisation, and the recursive interplay of nature and nurture. Far from offering a monolithic identity, it functions as a contested site wherein the performativity of identity is constructed and deconstructed into a dynamic ground of becoming. A sense of cultural stability is embedded in historical maps tethered to fixed spaces and the linear narratives of nation-states. These constructs, predicated on anthropocentric paradigms, are irreducibly contingent. This confluence has produced a condition of hypervisibility and cultivated an acute awareness of alterity, rendering my subjectivity legible through a lens of deviation. It can be considered an interruption within normative taxonomies of identity, as to inhabit this interstitial terrain is to dwell within states of liminality. It is a threshold space where fixed categories seemingly dissolve or meaning can be generated through the oscillation of perspectives and the tensions of gaze. Yet these tensions, like binary poles (self/other, origin/diaspora, presence/absence), are destabilised by the very geometry of the world, whose spherical form resists linear dialectics, not to mention the cyclic nature of heavenly bodies. It proposes a recursion: a turning back, a folding in, an eternal return. The DNA of my practice is situated within these loops and spirals of thought and form. I am navigating the circularities and contradictions that constitute contemporary subjectivity. Through this lens, making becomes both inquiry and intervention: a means of charting un-mappable terrains of identity, memory and becoming.
CNTRFLD. — You studied at Central Saint Martins in the UK before returning to the Philippines. How did this international experience shape your artistic perspective, and what were the biggest contrasts between the art scenes in London and Manila?
KSO. — The geological anchors of London and Manila have functioned as epistemological and ontological sites that have profoundly shaped my conceptual evolution. Let us analogise my practice as a canvas: Manila constitutes the chromatic origin, the palette of lived experience, affect, and ancestral grounding that initiated the arc of my inquiry. It is the locus where my practice’s foundational questions emerged primarily rooted in a deeply situated cultural consciousness, sensibility attuned to the complexities of postcolonial identity, social entanglements, and the poetic quotidian. London, by contrast, introduced the instruments, methodological apparatuses and critical frameworks through which these inquiries could be articulated and expanded. As a metropole of artistic infrastructure and intellectual exchange, London offers an immersive ecology of pedagogical rigour, institutional critique, and cross-cultural dialogue. The interplay between academic discourse, curatorial practices, studio experimentation and global art networks has allowed for a continual reframing of self and context. This dynamic convergence has catalysed a mode of thinking that privileges trans-local hybridity, reflexivity, and the pursuit of new epistemic configurations. As socially embedded and historically contingent ecosystems, Manila and London’s respective art scenes mirror the lived conditions and socio-political climates from which they emerge. They operate as discursive and productive sites where art reflects but also interrogates, contests, and reconfigures the prevailing realities of their respective contexts. While each city’s artistic milieu functions with its own internal logic, they are united in their capacity to generate critical dialogue and cultural meaning. Manila inspires artistic practices often from a deeply embedded engagement with national histories, socio-political urgencies, and localised narratives. The focus tends to gravitate toward internal complexities such as governance issues, class stratification, historical amnesia, and the negotiation of postcolonial identity. In this way, art is a witness. London, by contrast, operates within a globalised framework shaped by its cosmopolitan centre as a post-imperial metropolis where art can traverse geographies, temporalities, and epistemologies. A multiplicity of diasporic voices, transnational concerns and intersecting identities contribute to the diversity inherent in the cultural fabric. It enables the emergence of practices that are at once situated and globally resonant because the plurality facilitates expansive discourses abundant in intersectionality, fostering critical negotiations across cultural, political, and aesthetic boundaries.
CNTRFLD. — Your work deeply explores identity and origin, often engaging with symbolism and re-appropriation. What draws you to these themes, and how has your understanding of them evolved over time?
KSO. — My gravitation toward themes of identity and origin stems from a desire to interrogate the conditions under which the self is rendered intelligible or obscured. Symbolism and (re-)appropriation have become tools of representation and disruption. They allow for dismantling hegemonic narratives and contest the sedimented meanings ascribed to their presence as signifiers. Symbols are never neutral; they are charged containers of memory and then of possibility. I seek to activate latent meanings, to fracture their perceived stability, and to insert ruptures through which alternative readings may emerge to facilitate newness. My engagement is instinctual, effectively responding to the dissonance of inhabiting multiple cultural ontologies and evolving into more deliberation, operating at the intersection of autoethnography, critical theory, and material experimentation. I understand identity not as a fixed essence but as a porous, contingent, and performative construction, much like art, always in flux, always mediated by external gazes and internal negotiations.
CNTRFLD. — The “Aquarium” series emerged during the pandemic as an exploration of isolation, society, and symbolism. Can you discuss how this period shaped your creative process and how the themes of the series continue to resonate with you today?
KSO. — The “Aquarium” series emerged during profound global stillness and introspection. The COVID-19 pandemic imposed physical and psychological enclosures, disrupting habitual rhythms and severing access to the external world, communal spaces, and material resources. It constituted a rupture transcending geographic, political, cultural and psychological borders. The experience of isolation became a phenomenon enacted on a world stage, collective, synchronised, and profoundly disconcerting. Within these constraints, the domestic interior became a site for internal excavation, and the imposed stillness intensified recurring visual motifs that reflected inner states and external socio-political conditions. The Philippines had one of the longest lockdowns in the world, and the containment sparked deeper engagement with symbolic language, material sensitivity, and emotional resonance that navigated themes of detachment, voyeurism, and the fragility of constructed psychological, architectural, and ecological environments. Then came the metaphor of an aquarium: a transparent boundary containing a living ecosystem that allows for observation without much participation, encapsulating a condition of suspended visible separation. The aquarium operated not merely as a personal metaphor but as a structural analogue to broader social dynamics: containment, surveillance, alienation, and tenuous trust in systems of care and governance. Among these, the coral emerged as a potent symbol. This sessile organism often displays its most vivid and fluorescent colouration under duress or upon the brink of death before bleaching. The coral embodies a paradox: the saturated colours of life on the verge of total collapse into the unknown. This became a powerful metaphor for individual and collective endurance and further articulated the surreal vibrancy of isolation, the strange clarity that emerged from stillness, the intensity of interior worlds, and the haunting beauty of resilience forged under pressure. What began as a meditation on solitude has since evolved into a broader inquiry into constructing and negotiating thresholds. The series asks what it means to inhabit a porous world where interior and exterior, visible and invisible, self and other, continually intersect and blur. As we collectively navigate the aftermath, visibility, care, and connectedness questions remain urgent. In this way, the “Aquarium” series can be an ongoing conceptual framework to explore the fragile architecture of contemporary experience.
CNTRFLD. — In “Divine Dichotomy,” you examine opposing forces—light and shadow, freedom and constraint. Do you see these tensions reflected in your own experience as an artist, particularly in navigating different cultural identities?
KSO. — “Divine Dichotomy” seeks to evade classification as a strictly formal or thematic exploration. It articulates lived tensions and questions the paradoxes inherent in hybrid subjectivity. As a practitioner influenced by diverse cultural backgrounds, this experience of being in between is fertile and disorienting. It created friction that sparked the essence of the work that arises from this internal landscape. The canvas serves as a space to express contradictions: the desire for coherence in the face of differences and the quest for autonomy while being drawn in and building from inherited systems. The series dwells within them rather than seeking to reconcile or resolve. The woven elements, traditional textile idioms, are re-situated within contemporary mixed-media contexts and serve as both material and metaphor, foregrounding the simultaneity of continuity and rupture. These gestures resist narrative closure; instead, they propose paradox as a generative methodology that privileges entanglement over clarity and multiplicity over synthesis. “Divine Dichotomy” functions as both aesthetic inquiry and epistemological stance that insists on the validity of ambiguity and the necessity of spaces where contradiction is acknowledged and made productive. This is not a retreat from coherence but an invitation into a more capacious understanding of self, history, and form where difference is not a problem to be solved but a living condition.
CNTRFLD. — Your engagement with colour is deeply personal, rooted in memory and place. How did returning to the Philippines reshape your relationship with colour and its role in your artistic vocabulary?
KSO. — Colour is not a neutral or purely formal device but a bearer of cultural resonance, affective charge, and spatial intimacy. It is a language of place, passage, and presence. Colour in the archipelago is not subtle; it is saturated, alive, and constantly shifting with the light, temperature and humidity. There’s an emotional immediacy, a chromatic memory that lingers long after the image fades. That landscape can reawaken dormant visual and emotional registers. This chromatic intensity has become a pivotal axis, transforming my aesthetic sensibilities and the conceptual frameworks through which I explore memory, identity, and return. I began to consider colour deeply and its symbolic resonance as representational, atmospheric and compelling. It can carry the weight of place and history. Reacting with a sensory archive became a conduit for re-embodiment, re-mapping personal and reconnecting memory, and asserting a visual language that resists homogenisation.
CNTRFLD. — What has been your experience as an artist based in the Philippines? How would you describe the support systems available to artists there compared to those abroad?
KSO. — To significantly enhance the cultural landscape in the Philippines, we must reimagine and invigorate the role of museums. These institutions should be considered essential civic entities crucial in fostering a critically engaged public. This endeavour necessitates a paradigm of support that exceeds the vicissitudes of governmental policy and political will; therefore, it should be structural, sustained, and future-facing. Strategic investment in arts and culture does more than animate the creative capacities of individual artists; it cultivates intellectual and emotional resonance within communities and prioritises spaces for reflection, dialogue, and social cohesion. The museums we have mainly operate at more minor scales or under private stewardship and function less as dynamic cultural engines and more as boutique galleries constrained by limited resources, institutional precarity, and a narrow curatorial remit. Such limitations stifle transformative potential and curtail their capacity to serve as inclusive platforms for innovation and exchange. We should nurture existing infrastructures while cultivating new possibilities because the future depends on first attending to the vitality of the present. Then, there is competitive capitalism in the art world, which frequently obstructs equitable access to artistic experiences and privileges exclusivity over engagement. This can marginalise emergent voices or diverse publics and circumscribe the arts as a broader cultural and educational utility. Transforming this dynamic requires democratising access through expanding public collections, decentralising artistic programming, and institutional commitment to inclusivity across geographies and demographics. While the contributions of private individuals and patrons remain invaluable to the sustenance of the arts ecosystem, their efforts are understood as complementary rather than substitutive. It is incumbent upon the state to recognise and enact its responsibility to safeguard and promote the arts as a fundamental component of the public good and a critical dimension of our collective cultural inheritance. A robust cultural policy that supports museums as sites of both preservation and provocation can catalyse a flourishing arts ecology that serves artists, collectors, and audiences alike. Ultimately, nurturing a vibrant, inclusive, and critically engaged arts community is a shared undertaking that requires cross-sector collaboration, visionary policy, and an unwavering commitment to the transformative power of culture. In such a framework, the arts are not a luxury or afterthought but a vital connective tissue that binds society in its plurality, complexity, and possibility.
CNTRFLD. — Who or what have been your greatest influences, whether from Filipino or Spanish culture, personal encounters, or artistic movements?
KSO. — My influences form a constellation rather than a linear lineage spanning geographies, disciplines, temporalities, fictions and facts. From Filipino culture, I draw deeply from indigenous cosmologies, oral traditions, and the syncretic aesthetics that have emerged from centuries of colonial entanglement. There is a visual and conceptual richness in how memory, ritual, and resistance are embedded in everyday materials and gestures. From Spanish culture, I’ve been influenced by the enduring legacy of many Spanish artists whose works speak not only to aesthetic mastery but to the weight of image-making. Personal encounters have been equally formative. Conversations, the quiet poetics of domestic rituals, and the intergenerational transmission of cultural memory all inform the textures of my work. Artistically, I find resonance
with movements that embrace fragmentation and hybridity. Perhaps the most enduring influence is the condition of diaspora itself, the way it compels one to navigate multiplicity, dwell in between, and constantly re-articulate one’s position within shifting cultural and historical coordinates.
CNTRFLD. — What current or upcoming projects are you most excited about, and how do they expand on the themes you’ve previously explored?
KSO. — My practice is in a continual flux of thinking, drawing, expanding and contracting around ideas that often emerge slowly, intuitively, and in fragments. I cannot yet name the next project; it has not yet fully revealed its form or direction. I am attuning myself to it by listening, observing, and allowing space for it to unfold organically. This period of uncertainty is not passive; it is fertile. It echoes how I have always worked, trusting that the gestures, marks, and thoughts accumulating in the studio are already conversing with themes I return to again and again: memory, place, identity, and the sensorial language of colour. Whatever emerges next will be an extension of these concerns but shaped by new questions, new conditions, and a continually evolving perspective. Stay tuned!
CNTRFLD. — What advice would you give to young artists, particularly those navigating multiple cultural identities, who want to establish themselves in the contemporary art world?
KSO. — The world usually demands clarity and coherence, but there is strength in owning the complexity of your position and all the tensions and contradictions that come with it. Please do not feel pressured to resolve these complexities for others; let it inform your practice, deepen your questions, and shape your voice. Trust your intuition like a guide and remember that your perspective is not marginal; it is vital. Find people who challenge and support you, understand the nuances of cultural negotiation, and believe in the importance of thoughtful work. From there, build community, not just for visibility but for sustenance. The narratives you carry and the visual languages you inherit and reinvent are necessary contributions to the broader cultural fabric. Stay curious. Stay conscientious. Protect your joy. Thank you!
About the artist.
Katarina Ortiz (b. 1994) is a Filipino Spanish conceptual artist working to add her voice to contemporary art with a multidisciplinary approach. She holds a BFA FROM Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Her creative practice spans various mediums, including drawing, music production, photography, sculpture, collage, and painting, reflecting a commitment to conceptual depth and material experimentation. Ortiz’s oeuvre is a profound exploration of the complexities of the human condition, with a particular focus on the intertwined themes of identity and origin. Her work often engages with the symbolic, weaving together visual metaphors and allegorical narratives that challenge conventional perceptions of self and culture. By employing strategies of recontextualization and re-appropriation, Ortiz deftly subverts existing symbols and cultural signifiers, inviting viewers to consider or reconsider their inherent meanings and associations. Through this multidisciplinary lens, Ortiz creates profoundly personal and universally resonant Works, inviting audiences to question and reflect on the fundamental aspects of The Human Condition. Her work is a testament to the power of art to transcend boundaries, offering a nuanced commentary on the fluid nature of identity and the enduring search for origins in a globalized world. With thanks to Cesar Jun Villalon, Jr. and The Drawing Room for facilitating this conversation.
About the Drawing Room.
Founded in 1998, The Drawing Room is a Manila-based gallery committed to supporting artists whose practices reflect the Philippines’ ever-evolving cultural landscape. Originally established as a space dedicated to works on paper, it has grown into a platform for interdisciplinary artistic exploration, championing complex, critical, and socially engaged practices. Alongside monthly exhibitions in Manila, the gallery actively circulates its artists through off-site presentations and major art fairs in cities including Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, Jakarta, New York, and Paris.