IN TU: CARLO VILLAFUERTE

Working with fabrics, particularly sewing, is a gender-neutral pursuit. The women in Carlo Villafuerte’s family work with fabrics and threads. His father is a carpenter. His mother is a factory worker and for the past twenty years she has been sewing gloves for export. His grandmother does a lot of crocheting, making designs with repeating patterns of triangles, squares, rings, whorls and diamonds. His home economics teacher in high school told him his stitches in sewing class were well done and beautiful.

Carlo Villafuerte does sew. He works with fabrics and threads. And he does a great job with it. This medium of his art, with the influences of the women in his family, clearly begun at home, as it is with many things that start at home.

He does his art from a certain motivation. “Anger is a driving force. And it is sometimes my driving force,” he admits. But the resulting work of art that you find at the end of his process is something colorful, playful, pleasant, and hardly showing any signs of its darker beginnings.

The designs of his first works, evident in the first show of fabric art he had in 2008, comprised of patterns, much like his grandmother’s crochet. An inevitable expansion produced a bunch of works that take off from his usual repeating patterns, this time to include narratives and stories. The pieces on exhibit now turned out after a month of self-imposed exile where he did nothing but sew.

When his marriage failed, he cut up and sewed the clothes his wife left behind. He scouts the wagwagan, rummaging through heaps of used clothing in Hilltop, for fabric he can get for as cheap as ten pesos for three pieces. At one time he almost run out of clothes to wear because he cut his own clothes and used them for his works. His hands are calloused. Numerous needle pricks mark his fingers.

Perhaps it is because we want to move away from pain and anger, to change states when we feel hurt or pissed off, that we find a well of creative potential in such dark and down emotions or situations. A good friend and fellow artist once told him to stop dwelling in his painful past. And he did. He now feels as if a heavy burden, that something painful, is finally gone, making him whole. He creates art to actively take part in the future, his future.