A collaborative project with Filipina-American writer, Mary Grace Bertulfo:

“What Is the Smell of Blue?”
 
What is the smell of blue? Is it the scent of toasted coconut sweets drifting into the skies above the high rises of Manila? Is it Oslo’s salty waters warmed by the Gulf Stream from Mexico? Is it the lamentable absence of coconut and sea salt from Chicago’s Lake Michigan shores? Maybe it is the penetrating fumes of sadness ascending from our languages being muted? (The line, “What is the smell of blue?” is borrowed from poet Arlene Yandug’s “Going Back to the Island.”)
 
Our collaboration arose from one year of conversations about a hundred kinds of loves and losses pertaining to leaving, arriving, and finding one’s place—or not. We immersed ourselves in the concept of the archipelago, the geological term for an expanse of water with many scattered islands, a landscape that by definition implies spaces between. This flow between islands and continents evokes the emotional fluidity that we inhabit. As a second-generation Filipino American (Bertulfo) and a first-generation Norwegian immigrant (Engen), we always find ourselves in a challenging in-between space: neither fully here nor there.
 
Our heritage countries are similar in size, but the Philippines consists of 7,641 mountainous islands, while Norway is made up of a larger mainland with a coastline that includes 320,249 islands and islets. Bertulfo’s archipelago is an array of volcanic, rainforested islands surrounded by the Pacific Ocean. Engen’s consists of the ubiquitous large, small, and tiny rocks (many washed smooth over time by the waves), creating a barrier between the mainland and the North Atlantic Ocean. We instantly bonded over our experience of feeling torn between cultures, stretched and reshaped. Island landscapes stood as symbols of our estrangement from ourselves, yet simultaneously as a deep connection to who we are.


- 3 tapestries  
- Click on images for more information.