Wawi Navarroza and the unbearable strength of the female artist

“All the Anatolian influences, the mother goddesses, and just the different women, different (forms) of women—Ishtar, the Babylonian, everything,” she says. There, she learned the orans—a prayer position with outstretched arms and palms faced up. She found it powerful, as if a woman was summoning the powers that existed within her.

It was a spitting image of the orans.

“It was such an ‘aha’ moment... Hidilyn and the ancient,” muses Navarroza. “It’s essentially the same. When you do the orans, you’re literally bringing heaven to earth. And as women, we do that.”

She adds with a laugh: “I mean, even daily, I think.”

“The Weightlifter Orans”belongs to a new series of work called “As Wild as We Come”—self-portraits that Navarroza made as she was on the cusp of profound change. She was adjusting to her new life in Turkey; the soil in the bags in “The Weightlifter Orans” allude to stories she heard of migrant women holding on to soil from their home countries. She had also, at 41, just given birth.

In 2022, Navarroza featured this series in a solo show at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London; now, it’s been displayed at Art Fair Philippines 2023—the first time she’s unveiled the images to Filipino audiences.

Composed of carefully constructed, in-studio photographs, the series continue an aesthetic Navarroza forged in a previous series called “Tropical Gothic,” where distinct elements of Philippine culture fused into bright, brazenly chaotic tableaus. Folk and pagan motifs; vestiges of Spanish colonial baroque; the hot, piercing colors of the country’s eternal summer—all collided to confront viewers’ stereotypes of the exotic. This new series, however, layers traces of her life in Turkey. In one image, she wears a silk kaftan and sits in front of a balikbayan box. In another, she is a vessel for a river of blood, gushing down from the ceiling to her feet.

These tableaus “celebrate what we’ve been conditioned to be ashamed about,” Marv Recinto writes in the exhibition notes. Wildness, kitsch, excess, womanhood—all of it. At first glance, the works indeed radiate joy and celebration. Explosive colors and patterns evoke the artist’s memories of vibrant Manila fiestas. Two pieces quite literally depict birthday cakes.

But beneath the revelry, there is something intensely vulnerable about them. Motherhood shook Navarroza’s core, and these works bare the feeling of one’s identity shattering to pieces.

She wrestled with the question: Am I still an artist if I’m not making?

In 2014, famed artist Tracey Emin said in an interview, “There are good artists who have children. Of course there are. They are called men.” Historically, galleries hesitate to invest in the careers of women of childbearing age, perceiving them as a risk. It’s no wonder, then, that artists like Navarroza still feel like motherhood is taboo in the art world. “There’s this anxiety that the art world might be hostile to this,” she shares. “That I would be forgotten.”

In “Portals / Double Portrait,” Navarroza juxtaposes two versions of herself. On the left, she sports shiny blue pants and bold red heels, as if ready to disco; on the right, she is more subdued, wearing a long dress and holding her son on her lap. Their gazes meet. They confront one another—but, tellingly, do not compete. Neither version of herself is portrayed as larger, or above the other. Instead, there is balance.

Seismic changes over the past three years left Navarroza with a haze of questions as to who she was. This work, however, seems to symbolize a breakthrough—a poignant embrace of her richly complex, expanding self. Now, Navorroza believes that one can be both mother and artist.

“You’re still an artist until the day you die,” she shares. “Because that’s who you are. It’s your being.” She seems to speak to herself—but also, to a crowd of other mothers. Artists.

When Navarroza makes self-portraits, she channels not only her life, but the lives of other women and artists who have come before her. “It’s me showing up for all the others who also have gone through the same.” Women, she believes, are “so complex that we enter through the experiences of other women as well.” In this way, empathy is essential to her process.

And how does she do this? How does she enter through the lives of others in its most raw, visceral sense?

By “going back to the body.”

As she made “As Wild as We Come,” Navarroza suffered an autoimmune condition called Graves’ disease. It left her exhausted, demanding that she rest at every step of constructing her photographs. Hang the curtains. Lie down. Set up the lights. Lie down. Ready the camera. Lie down. Pose as the subject. Lie down. And then get up to care for her child.

“It was very surreal. I don’t remember how it was all done,” she says. She persevered by going beyond herself. She believed her work mattered — that it would help not only herself but others. She did it for her son. She did it for everybody. When she finally finished 10 pieces, she was in disbelief. “Wow, I actually made it?” she says, laughing.

“It was magical, and at the same time, almost a miracle.”

It was almost like witnessing a young Filipina lifting four times her weight up to the sky, giving the world a glimpse of heaven.