Agnes Arellano
Ateneo Art Gallery
The individual components of Agnes Arellano’s sculptures are quite recognizable: nude female figures, human limbs, phallic totems, a variety of bone. These forms are rendered in white cold-cast marble and are almost luminous in their candle-like smoothness. But when the artist brings these elements together into sculptural assemblages, the boundaries between them start to blur, and the human melds with myth. In Haliya Bathing, 1983, the eponymous moon goddess bathes in a pond of crushed marble, her pregnant body poised as if in labor. In Carcass-Cornucopia, 1987, a cast of the artist’s body,