EP82: A Sanctuary of Memories Ambie Abaño Built | Printmaking, Beyond My Body, Ibarra Dela Rosa, AAP

Ambie Abaño does not merely practice printmaking—she redefines what it can be. In her hands, a medium often associated with repetition, labor, and technical discipline becomes something far more urgent: a vehicle for confronting the most fundamental questions of existence. While printmaking has traditionally been valued for its reproducibility, Abano turns it inward, transforming it into a site of introspection where life, death, and the fragile passage between them are examined with unflinching clarity. By her own admission, she is not simply a maker of things. She is a thinker who uses making as a means to arrive at thought. Each body of work emerges from a particular moment in her life, shaped by lived experience rather than detached observation. Nowhere is this more evident than in Beyond the Body, where the female form becomes both subject and witness to time itself. The works trace a continuum—from the fullness of youth to the life-changing power of pregnancy to the quiet inevitability of aging. These are not merely images of a body; they are meditations on becoming, on change, and on the inexorable movement toward decline. In confronting these realities, Abaño compels the viewer to do the same. Her repeated use of her own face intensifies this confrontation. It is not an act of vanity but of necessity. The self becomes her most immediate and available subject—one that cannot be escaped or idealized. In carving her image into wood, she enacts a profound doubling: the artist and the image enter into a dialogue, each shaping the other. The process is stripped of self-consciousness; what remains is an almost surgical honesty. She watches herself come into being through her own hands, collapsing the distance between creator and subject. In this sense, Abaño is not only making the work—she is the medium through which it passes. What further distinguishes her practice is a refusal to accept the limits imposed by tradition. For Abaño, printmaking is not confined to paper. By transferring her prints onto textiles—surfaces already marked by pattern and history—she disrupts the expectation of purity and control. The collision between pre-existing designs and her own imagery creates a dynamic tension that feels at once familiar and radically new. This is not experimentation for its own sake; it is a deliberate expansion of the medium’s expressive possibilities, as in her use of Spandex. It proves that innovation arises not from abandoning discipline but from questioning its assumptions. Yet beneath this spirit of play lies a seriousness that anchors her work. Abaño takes risks, but they are guided by intent and a clear understanding of what is at stake. She recognizes that printmaking, often celebrated as a democratic art form for its multiplicity, can do more than circulate images—it can transform them. In her practice, the medium sheds its purely physical function and becomes metaphysical, capable of holding not just forms but ideas, not just impressions but states of being. This is ultimately what makes Ambie Abaño’s work so compelling. She does not ask us to admire technique alone, nor to marvel at innovation for its own sake. She asks us to reckon—with the body, with time, with the self. And in doing so, she elevates printmaking beyond craft or convention, asserting its power to engage the deepest concerns of human existence.