up front w/ Thea Yabut

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Thea Yabut, “Imaginal discs on auto-drive,” 2024

paper, pigment, calcium carbonate, glue, epoxy clay, bronze, aluminum panel, 25 x 26.5 x 1.5 in. (courtesy of the Gallery)

Thea Yabut (b. 1985, Vancouver, CA) inscribes her Chinese and Filipina diasporic roots into the materials of her low-relief sculptures. As a Montreal-based visual artist, she transforms colored paper pulp—originally sourced from old drawings—combined with brass nodes and upholstery pins into textured, meditative works that evoke protection, transformation, and otherness. With each kneaded layer, Yabut guides the material through a process of remembrance, bridging the subconscious and the sacred in an elemental and piercing visual language. Imbued with ancestral energy, her sculptures explore the fluid nature of identity—how it ripples through race, gender, and the body, living as time rather than within it.

Influenced by metalwork and jewelry repair and assembly, Yabut’s embellishment speaks to the role of self-expression and autonomy in constructing personal and cultural identity. This is art as ritual and rot—ornamentation becomes a portal to self-discovery. Yabut’s works meditate on the body, channeling spirit through material. These haunting, haunted pieces hold space for the unspoken, offering a tactile dialogue between past and present, self and world. Through deliberate adornment and abstraction, Thea Yabut constructs a powerful narrative about the fluidity of self, inviting viewers into an evolving conversation between materiality and identity that asks: Can the material speak for the soul, and what happens when its voice meets the hand that shapes it?