Angelina McComiskey
angie personal cartography
seafood city
dissonance of a home (2005?, 1987?, 2008?)
the islands remember everything
curationarchived work
about + CV
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embedded into my skin, like thorns from a rose
11.5” x 8”
2026
handmade paper (paper scraps, banana leaf from my garden), xerox print, blind embossing (rosary made of rose petals from the Vatican and other rosaries), sunlight
This work uses handmade paper, xerox prints, and blind embossing, or rosaries from my home, to explore the heavy imprint of Catholicism and Christianity on Filipino identity and my own family history.
In the Philippines and its diaspora, Catholic iconography is not merely a matter of personal faith; it is woven into daily work. The process of blind embossing reflects this dynamic. To emboss without ink is to leave an indentation, a forced shape and ghosted texture pressed into the paper's fibers. Over time, it could fade and sponge back, but sometimes it leaves a permanent imprint. It represents how Catholicism feels in my experience. An inescapable pressure that shapes the environment long after the active belief is gone.
This pressure can cause lasting harm. When my Lola was battling cancer, her changing behavior led to one of my other family members claiming she was possessed, creating superstition for empathy and causing harm within our family.
My home remains populated by these same iconographies. They are relics of a shared cultural landscape that I simply cannot erase. By embossing the rosaries into handmade paper, I examine the tension of how we carry the weight of tradition that has damaged us, and how its impressions remain visible in the spaces we live.