DesignTO Artist + Designer Spotlight: Bianca Weeko Martin by Kerala Woods
Since 2011, DesignTO has featured a wealth of talent through our annual festival and year-round programming. The Artist + Designer Spotlight series gives our audience the chance to learn more about the creatives showcasing their work.
Bianca Weeko Martin?is a multi-faceted designer, artist and past DesignTO exhibitor. Recently, Bianca showcased the work ‘Universal House/Particular House’ at the 2022 DesignTO Festival. We caught up with Bianca to learn more about her and her practice.
How would you describe your profession and your practice?
I studied architecture, branched out into publishing and curation, and am a passionate practitioner of the arts and the Internet.
Has your work changed over the course of your career?
I spent my undergraduate degree interning at various corporate and boutique-sized architectural firms around the world, and upon graduating began working locally and increasingly more in the sphere of artists and art institutions. Throughout all of this, I maintained a drawing practice and kept a series of notebooks. I have only recently started to scale these drawings up – through research, digital tools, and different art-making approaches.
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Is your work inspired by anything in particular? What turns you on creatively?
I am inspired by history and the future. My most important source of inspiration oscillates between my family histories and ancestral stories, and my dreams and speculations of what the city around me could be.
Which designers or artists inspire you and why?
Philip Beesley, my mentor; Danh Vo and Julie Mehretu for their skill and stories; Leandro Locsin for his contribution to Filipino design identity; my best friend Pablo Prado Serrano; and all the talented and beautiful artists, writers, curators, illustrators, planners, photographers, academics, and graffiti writers who I am so lucky to have in my immediate circle of peers.
The last few years have been a wild ride. How has it changed you for the better?
I decided to do my Master of Architecture during the pandemic. Ironically, this somewhat predictable move actually jump-started many of the art projects I find myself engaged with now, as I was allowed the time and resources to dedicate myself to research. With the isolation and remoteness that the pandemic restrictions brought, I conducted online video calls with members of my family and became fixated on my dad’s ancestral house in the Philippines. I was on the curatorial team of ‘Faith and Fortune: Art Across the Global Spanish Empire’, an exhibition on Spain, Latin America and the Philippines, which is on at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) until October. Basically, this past year has given me so many opportunities to learn!