Marielle Desamparado

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ARTIST CATALOGUE

Ampalaya: Vessel of Home

My work explores the complexities of identity through the lens of my Filipino heritage and my experience as a first-generation Filipino South African. At its core, it is a deeply personal journey, an ongoing inquiry into what “home” truly means. I reflect on what home was, what it has become, and how it continues to live within me. Much of my experience is shaped by a sense of in-betweenness. A theory that Homi Bhabha describes as the “Third Space,” where fragments of culture, memory, and displacement converge to form new and hybrid meanings of belonging. 

This liminal space has become central to my artistic practice. I often return to themes of family, legacy, and storytelling, a particularly oral and intergenerational narratives that connect me to my roots. Narrative, for me, is not merely a means of preservation but a language of continuity and self-discovery. Through remembered, shared, and sometimes imagined stories, I begin to map the evolving relationship between heritage, memory, and identity. Recently, my work has turned more intentionally toward the persistence of self across time, how memory anchors us to place, and how we, in turn, carry those memories within us. I work closely with personal and familial archives, which serve as a conceptual and material foundation within my methodology of casting. 

These archives inform both process and form, allowing me to translate memory into tangible, cast material. Through this synthesis, I examine how physical acts of reproduction can embody remembrance and transformation, bridging the space between presence and absence. A recurring motif in my practice is the vessel, embodied primarily through the vegetable Ampalaya (bitter melon). The Ampalaya operates both as a literal and metaphorical container. As an extension of my exploration into how identity, memory, and culture are held and transmitted. Its form and texture carry associations of nourishment, resilience, and inherited knowledge. As a vessel, it becomes a site of convergence where the personal and collective, remembered and imagined, internal and external aspects of identity meet. 

The Ampalaya thus transforms into a material expression of hybridity, displacement, and belonging. My practice centres on casting as a means of material translation, giving form to memory, silence, and the intangible. Each work emerges through processes of accumulation, loss, and renewal, mirroring how identity itself is continuously constructed and reshaped. Through this process, I seek to define home not as a fixed geography but as a living, evolving space that is shaped by memory, movement, and imagination. Through this ongoing exploration, I have discovered a profound sense of belonging and community. The act of making has become its own vessel and a channel through which the portability of culture is created and sustained. In this space of making and remembering, my art becomes both an archive and an offering: a way to honor what is inherited, to reclaim what was displaced, and to celebrate the continual unfolding of identity within the dynamic space of becoming.