Mark Valenzuela

Mark Valenzuela (b.1980) is a contemporary artist living and working in Adelaide, South Australia. Born in the Philippines, and having grown up in army camps across Mindanao – the second-largest island in the south – Valenzuela moved to Australia in 2011. His artistic practice has since oscillated between the two countries, informed by the geopolitics of both.

Valenzuela began his career as a painter in the late 1990s. He produced drawings, public murals and private commissions while studying mechanical engineering – the closest available offering to fine arts – at Silliman University in Dumaguete, central Philippines. Traditional painting supplies, however, proved costly and difficult to source. Valenzuela quickly turned his hand to ceramics instead, capitalising on the natural resource of terracotta clay soil found locally in Daro, a northern barangay (suburb) of Dumaguete. Valenzuela would spend his days travelling up into the mountains where he would dig, process and prepare the clay, in study of the material. During this period, under the informal tutelage of visiting practitioners from Japan, he also learnt the skills of makeshift kiln building, wood firing and pit firing – an early kiln-less technique where clay is baked in an open fire dug into the ground.

Although his practice wilfully resists categorisation, ceramics has come to be an enduring medium for Valenzuela. Over the past two decades, it has functioned as a linchpin to his wider installations – a practice combining elements of painting, drawing, sculpture, video, found objects, even street art. When using clay, Valenzuela says, “you make a friend and an enemy.”[1] It begins its life as a malleable, soft material which, once dried then fired at high temperatures, vitrifies into ceramic. This elemental alchemy – where fire transforms earth – makes it an ideal medium for Valenzuela, particularly in his explorations of control, conflict, fragility and resilience. “There are a lot of challenges in ceramics… it is part of the struggle. You encounter breakages, works crack, they can explode [in the kiln]; it is the perfect material for conflict.”[2]

The unique properties of clay also give rise to Valenzuela’s distinct ceramic forms. Inanimate objects are hybridised or seen to amalgamate with human and animal body parts. A rubber duck morphs into a car tyre; a pig’s ear coddles a human ear; hooked fingers become horns, noses, beaks and tails. Clay often dictates the form of these shapeshifters. “Sometimes, clay moves by itself. It will tell you, it will guide you to go this way or that… Clay is alive.”[3]

[1] Mark Valenzuela, in conversation with author, 22 April, 2021. [2] Mark Valenzuela, unpublished interview by Belinda Howden, video recording by Thomas Smeets, Adelaide, 12 June, 2021, 8:33.[3] Ibid, 18:23.

For Valenzuela, hybridity is not just a material approach but a conceptual tactic, too. Throughout Filipino art history, the hybrid has come to be an important metaphor. Many artists have used it to address violent, ongoing histories of Spanish and American colonisation and occupation, as well as forced migration, and the resulting challenges to their cultural identity or sense of belonging. As a result, the hybrid embodies transition and deformity, adaptation and resilience. Valenzuela’s part-animal, part-human bust Regrets I’ve had a few (2020) explores this idea. Not only is the figure a mutant – a portrait of a creature between states – but it also embodies the categorical freedom of the hybrid. The defaced man, with hair like a rooster’s cockerel, is crafted to be neither one thing nor another, and yet recognisably both.

Valenzuela is deeply interested in the politics of space. He articulates space through his installation practice, using combinations of mediums and objects to highlight the spatial tensions of a site. He makes use of available surfaces – the floor, walls, ceiling, corners, any pre-existing architecture, even outdoor settings or the street – as well as builds free-standing sculptural structures to support individual works. This practice has emerged partially to circumvent the traditions of ceramics, given its long historical association with vessels and functional objects. But, it also describes Valenzuela’s interest in concepts of territory and crossing boundaries.

Once bitten, twice shy (2020), was an installation by Mark Valenzuela that spanned both the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Adelaide Botanic Gardens.

Beneath the sunken rooftops of Once bitten, twice shy a bakunawa snakes, a serpent-like dragon of pre-colonial Filipino mythology. The bakunawa has many different imaginings according to the diverse Indigenous populations and regions of the Philippines. However, in the Central Islands – the Visayas, where Valenzuela lived as a young man – bakunawa was considered responsible for the natural phenomenon of lunar eclipses as well as natural disasters, such as typhoons or earthquakes.

In Once Bitten, Twice Shy (2020), Valenzuela installed a steel armature in the Palm House at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. The triangular structure was populated with ceramic hybrids and a rooster-like figure, posed as the tail of the bakunawa. For Valenzuela, the bakunawa is “a symbol of invasion… ever since, my country is a space subject to colonisation. There are always forces around it trying to invade or trying to take it from us.”[4]

Valenzuela’s installation practice also includes processes of reconfiguration. “I reconfigure [works of art] all the time… It is part of my daily ritual. Like, ‘Oh, that’s nice there. But what if I put it beside this [work]?’ It has a totally different meaning.”[5] Rearranging works into new formations and spatial relationships is yet another expression of traversing borders and boundaries. In transplanting objects, taking them from one context to another, Valenzuela watches their new meanings and stories unfold.

[4] “Mark Valenzuela,” Art Gallery of South Australia, filmed as part of the Monster Theatres Virtual Tour, 2020, 1:20. [5] Valenzuela, unpublished interview, 12:39.