Fresh from her exhibit in Calgary, Canada, Paulina Constancia's set the local art world abuzz with her Story Tiling exhibit for the Cebuanos.
Paulina Constancia's journey has been very impressive and rewarding from designing her own line of clothing at age 17 to her most recent display of artistic versatility in Story Tiling. She was also featured in a number of articles here and abroad. "The Strings Calling" from her Floral Chorus collection graced the back cover of the Reader's Digest in December 1997 and a book published by the Ayala Foundation also featured her work "Let's Get Corny."
At a time when local artists were pushing the boundaries of conventional art, Constancia first experimented with assemblage art made of construction materials. This turned out to be the first of many fun exhibit projects.
The next exhibit Solo (Montebello Hotel, Cebu) featured sculpture and paintings on plates showing her leanings for fervid colors. Floral Chorus (Shangrila Edsa Plaza Hotel, Metro Manila) used kitchen cabinet faces and pre-framed canvasses. Her idea was to extend her paintings over the frames. She was literally breaking barriers! After acquiring her diver's license, Constancia featured her face-to-face fishy experiences in Fish to Face (Ayala Museum, M.M.) All these works loudly echoed life in vivid colors jumping out of her art.
A grant of a 4-month residency led to Sundance (Vermont, USA), a joint exhibit with an African American, Kymberli Johnson. Constancia's grant at the Vermont Studio Center culminated in Tropical Flavors which was said to be the warmest of exhibit preparations which occurred at the height of winter. The style of this latest exhibit continued in New York in Here's to Sunny! at the Philippine Center located at the prestigious 5th Avenue.
After three exhibits in the US, Constancia decided to live in a rural farm in her native island. This proved to feed her artistic Filipino spirit. And Heaven and Nature Sing (CAP Art Center, Cebu), so fitting for a December show, featured her imaginative new artworks which for the first time were reliefs in cement. Her

communion with nature further nurtured another art form that stole its way into Constancia's heavenly collection, the art of poetry. From then on, poetry accompanied many of her artworks.
How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? Constancia soon set her eyes on Mexico, where she studied ceramics at the Clay Ole and spoke Spanish with astounding fluency for three months. In Mexico, the fabric of life, its temper and vibrancy resulted in Twogetherness/ Estando Juntos (La Galleria, Teatro Angela Peralta, Guanajuato). This entire collection focused on the synchronicity of two persons in clay relief.
She spent her last weeks in Mexico feverishly creating a similar exhibit for Cebu. She solved the problem of carting back heavy reliefs by producing another rendition of reliefs in fabric. Within a month after her arrival, the Honorary Consul of Mexico presented Calidoscopio (CAP Art Center, Cebu).
Her works eventually caught the attention of Haarlemmermeer, Cebu's sister city in Europe, and Constancia breezed into Netherlands with her exhibit Hue and I: In a Secret Garden/ Kleur en ik in de geheime tuin (Kunst 2001 Gallery in Badhoevedorp and the Centrum voor Kunst en Cultuur "de Meerse" in Hoofddorp). A similar exhibit titled The Secret Gardens (SM Art Center, Cebu) followed. Her reliefs in fabric soon developed into quilt reliefs as seen in both exhibits. These were in painted quilts with foam and understitching. This soon developed into what Constancia coined as "paintitchings" which was first exposed to the public in the PULSO (Gallery 7, Canada) and Kiss and Bliss (Waterfront Hotel,Cebu). In this collection, Constancia ceaselessly painted and stitched to which further details were added by overstitching.
And now we come to Constancia's most recent artistic production: Story Tiling featuring Tales on Ceramic Tiles titled in Cebuano. This was first exhibited at the Kutz International Center, Louisville, Kentucky USA. In this method, colors and hues change by several intensities after firing ceramics to