Kristine Segovia is a Dublin based artist and has works across various mediums and materials. The subject of her works often touches personal issues and stories in her life such as race, identity, and culture in conjunction to creating a broader social project to allow viewers to connect to her work. For this project she uses painting as her practice to discuss the topic of immigration.
It’s a personal and broader social portrait is an array of paintings that revolves around the subject of immigration using oil paint on canvas. This project is not only a personal project, but it is also a broader social project that many individuals can relate to. Immigration plays a vital role in Kristine’s life as she moved to Ireland from the Philippines when she was six and since then has been living with the effects of immigration. Permanently migrating from one place to another have significant psychological effects on individuals, such as the questioning and uncertainty of their identity. Immigration can cause cultural bereavement to many. The sudden loss of familiarity, language, and everyday social surroundings may cause tremendous stress and anxiety therefore suffer feelings of guilt over abandoning their culture and homeland. They feel the desire to complete the obligations of keeping their ethnic values and traditions in conjunction with respecting the values and traditions of the country they are living in. The discrepancy over not being seen as ‘ethnic’ enough in one’s birth country but also being looked at as an alien in the country they live in factors in a lot to one’s self-identity.
Maps rendered important sources for the creation of the paintings. The widespread use of maps is to show diagrammatic representation of an area of land or sea showing physical features, cities, roads, etc. In this project, maps depicted as night lights portray distance, displacement, home, culture, and identity. The paintings depict collages of two countries and migration routes. The action of merging the countries together takes away the distance between the two regions creating a new and special place that speaks value to one’s identity. The paintings of the maps coexist as a portrait of the artist as well as portrait of other people who immigrated to other countries.