Before Geraldine Datuin painted flora, she remembers harvesting from the avocado and malunggay trees outside of her home on Guåhan, the indigenous CHamoru name for Guam. Her grandparents immigrated from the Philippines, bringing much of their family with them, though her family still has profitable rice paddies in the Philippines. Now Datuin paints canvases and murals about plants as a way to understand herself as a diaspora Filipina. Her debut solo show, “HALF-FLOWER,” opened at Lee-Reyes Gallery in Tumon in January of 2023. When Datuin is not painting under her pseudonym SIGWARZ (see-gwars), she works at a nursery to combat the extinction of native plant species. Her work with flora filters into her art as a way to bridge the connections between nature and peoples indigenous to and immigrants of Guam.
Datuin grew up in the village of Mangilao, bordering Dededo, home to a major Filipino population, which makes up 26 percent of Guam. She graduated from the University of Guam in 2014 where she took classes in creative writing and fine arts yet earned her degree in anthropology and archeology. Despite Datuin’s love of art, when she became a mother, she chose a career that would support her and her son. She received a Fulbright Scholarship to complete an Msc in Conservation and Biodiversity at Exeter University, which taught her the scientific linguistics for many of the plants that surrounded her in her youth.
Datuin’s work has incorporated sand, chains and soil, but her main goal for the paintings is that they dry quickly. Momentum is part of her work. She works with acrylics because oils dry too slowly in Guam’s humid climate, and the speed comes through in her quick, overlapping and blended brush strokes. Oil pastels and spray paint are nearly illustrative as they emphasize line and highlight framing. She uses bold hues and deep shadows that are nearly fauvist, layering with a purpose. The bright colors are a call—in the same way flowers summon pollinators, she summons our attention. Even though Datuin is not indigenous to Guam, she is deeply aware of her story—not only of her family’s history but of her solidarity as an indigenous Filipina with roots from a country with shared colonial histories. She turns her subjects, both indigenous peoples and immigrants, into flowers that grow in Micronesia and the wider Pacific region as a way to tell the true stories about the people who live on these lands.
These paintings generally depict people Datuin knows, including herself, and many of her figures are in classical Renaissance poses. She wants both the indigenous CHamoru and immigrant peoples of Guam to see themselves posed in monumental stories, but she also intentionally uses these poses to call forth a broader audience—to speak in a visual language that is familiar to Western viewers, reclaiming space dominated by the West and bringing visibility to Guam’s art scene. “Creating visuals of self-portraiture, indigenous and immigrant islander peoples alongside native and naturalized plants and flowers is a way that I try to understand what it means to be part of the Filipino diaspora,” the artist told Observer.
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Datuin’s skills as a botanist help her create narratives and dialogue with concepts of indigeneity for Pacific Island and immigrant communities whose histories of colonization are interconnected and reach far back while continuing to this day. Guam is currently a U.S. territory, and one-third of the island’s land is used by the American military for training and other purposes. There are plans to expand operations—in 2020, Camp Blaz, which was set to destroy what was left of the 10 percent of ancient limestone forests remaining on the island, opened. As mitigation for this buildup, the military agreed to fund a variety of ecological restoration projects, including Datuin’s work with plants, but it remains controversial because so much of the land has been taken away from the CHamoru people to create conservation areas—acreage that was accessible for many generations has become inaccessible.
“Honoring and protecting sacred land in Guahan is important to me because this place holds the people I love and care about,” Datuin said. “I think about how some indigenous CHamoru are reclaiming their language, culture and land with various colonial forces up against them. That is something that I deeply resonate with as a Filipina woman in the diaspora.”
Reclaiming her identity as a Filipina has been tricky because of her own tendency to romanticize a motherland. The diptych Fighting the Colonizer (2022) features two apparently female figures boxing. One is shadowed with their back to the viewer. Rising from the back of the front-facing figure are flowers shaped like snakes’ heads or claws. This figure is helped by signature petroglyphs like wind or
The people of Guam cannot vote for a U.S. president, and while the island has a representative in Congress, when it comes to military operations, locals have almost no say. This is a complicated topic because the U.S. military presence offers those on Guam a certain amount of financial security. But the cost of military presence is high from land justice and ecological standpoints. Many are beginning to openly discuss what it might mean to have statehood or to be independent of the U.S. Datuin’s paintings are not the only artworks being shown that present a decolonial stance. In our conversation, the artist speculated that this rise in military operations helped spark a recent show Datuin was included in at the Guam Museum. Presented in collaboration with Micronesia Climate Change Alliance and Hita Litekyan, “Ta Na’i Animu” or “to give your entire spirit” showed work by indigenous and Pasifika artists who are working through art to express their stories, perspectives and hopes relating to a sovereign, sustainable and equitable future.
Because of her depth of knowledge and her passion for the subjects in the works, Datuin’s paintings have several layers of symbolism. The human figures in her paintings are entwined with flowers and encircled with petroglyphs that give a sense of movement to the figures. If the figures are not moving, they are often surrounded by wind. “Movement is present in the unseen,” Datuin said of these small figures who are the ancestors. These petroglyphs look like a letter being repeated over and over again, and their hard angles suggest the movement of insects whirring on the canvas. But in truth, they are the outline of bones.
“The archeological side of looking for human bones, which is what happens when any large-scale construction project occurs in Guam, is a requirement for the project to reach completion,” she said. “This has led to the desecration of ancestral burials of the CHamoru people in the expansion of the military bases here, which is why I moved away from anthropology and archaeology. As an Indigenous Filipina, I would not want my ancestors’ burial grounds to be disturbed.” She tries to bring to life in her paintings the bones she might have disrupted through archaeology, as in Bones of my Ancestors (2016), an early painting of an odalisque-shaped woman. Her body is layered with earthy colors, with shades of pink and coral, all nearly transparent against a soft gray backdrop. Embedded in her body is a sketch of an anatomically accurate skeleton, which repeats itself below the figure, bending and layering on top of one another. Datuin insists that skeletons are flexible and have their own characters and that the bodies themselves are merely wearing them.
One theme in many of Datuin’s paintings, which largely feature figures and spirits, is movement, which is to say a dissolution or dissolving of boundaries. She illustrates the phenomenon of observing nature: the closer you look at land the more you see traces of movement, whether migrations, changes due to climate, volcanoes or the movement of glaciers. Land does not know borders, nor do plants. The odalisque in Bones of my Ancestors has a flower for a head with a bright yellow center like a beacon.
For Datuin, botany and the language of plants and ecosystems directly mirror the language of the migration, movement and indigeneity of people. By referencing plants in her art, she hopes to inspire dialogue around the deeply entrenched relationships people have with their ecosystems. They Bloom in These Lands/Ifit Flower Crown (2022) features a woman standing nude, her hands extended over her head. The adjacent ifit flower is native from Madagascar to the Philippines and from Australia through Thailand. Like many islands, Guam has many endemic species and an ecosystem that has spent millennia adapting to volcanic and post-oceanic conditions. The island is also home to ancient limestone forests whose soil is porous, shallow, low in Ph and calcium-rich. It has the capacity to create freshwater aquifers through its chemical composition, and its environment is jagged, perfect for cave-dwelling creatures like crabs. Herbs and trees alike have adapted to this distinctly shallow soil with shallow root systems. Datuin described the ifit flower as one that has learned to survive under many conditions, incorporating itself into the value and culture of peoples and places.
The future of this artist’s work involves the representation of Filipina women in the diaspora and the Western male gaze, with a focus on botanical anatomy. She will include people of all genders, but she plans for this future work to focus on the integration of women with the reproductive parts of plants. Recently she painted the last mother tree of the Serianthes in a Land as an Altar (2022)—it was destroyed in the recent typhoon, Mawar. “This is why I have to wear many hats, one is my day job and the other one is my passion,” the artist said. “My paintings are an expression of that critique combined with activists’ sentiments and personal lived experiences.” Datuin was recently part of the ALLBLACK Event in Manila, which was her first international exhibition, and her themes translated well.
In the town of Toto (pronounced Toh-Tu) in Guam, there is a painting of Datuin’s grandmother on a wall. In the work, her grandmother is surrounded by various forms of renewable energy, and it’s more than just an ode to the variety of renewable energy sources available on the island of Guam. This is Datuin’s second mural, commissioned by the University of Guam under the Guam Green Growth (G3) Program, and it incorporates the people of the island upholding an elder in the community, tying the past together with the future. She painted the figure and her colorful landscape using a paintbrush taped to a long stick. “It’s freehand: there’s no projector. I didn’t use a lift,” explained Datuin, who is comfortable with working at this scale. She has a bravery about her that is visible in the range of colors she uses and the sharp edges of her forms. From the island of Guam she tells her story, and she tells the story of the people and plants she loves. She is not the only artist interested in the places where people meet land, where land rights are addressed and issues of sovereignty are called for. She is only one of them, and with all the botanical knowledge she has, she paints like a flower—calling attention to causes that are important to her, instinctively knowing how to spread her ideas and stay connected to her own roots and story.
