pusong mamon

Margery Cercado

I was first introduced to the idea of visiting The Burke collections in 2024, on my 33rd birthday. I attended the museums’ Building the Barangay event and witnessed many important reflections on cultural belongings found in Collections, rooted in the histories of the Filipinx/a/o community and our shared togetherness. While there, I met many community members, including Gabbie Mangaser and Dr. Holly Barker, who both invited me to go through Collections in the future. Since then, I have been back several times, touching and looking through various cultural objects, each time with far more knowing and understanding of my shared connection as a diasporic Filipinx person. I have also been invited to work at The Burke’s Artist Studio twice, inspired by belongings and stories found within and outside the museum. It has been such an honor and a great joy to not only be invited to The Burke to hold and behold many items within Collections, but to also find community through my time there. I am wholeheartedly grateful to the Burke, Holly and especially Gabbie for continually showing care and building a connection with me, as well as facilitating my connection with my community, my Motherland and my diaspora. It’s something I’ll always carry with me, and that carrying is strongly tethered to my work as an artist.

I have always wondered about what we carry with us. Meaning, the intangible things: the memories, the people we’ve known, our secrets, our shames, our desires, our comforts, our joys, and all the like. As an artist, I make much of my work in search of understanding this idea among other complex tensions I have felt since childhood. Tensions that I have since learned to name as Diasporic Longing. Diasporic Longing is a concept in which diasporic individuals are often searching for “home”, which is not a physical place, but a space always subject to change and narrated in the process of “becoming.”

As an artist, this concept of Diasporic Longing is at the heart of my practice, which is unearthed and held by means of discovery and play through materials and process. In my work, I look into Diasporic Longing through the lens of a Queer, second-generation Filipinx American, the eldest and sole daughter, born in Seattle, the Indigenous lands of the Duwamish people. It is through these processes and within materiality that I find and begin to understand what I question and carry within myself, and how in some ways, similarly and differently, my fellow diasporic kababayans are carrying themselves. I suppose this is why I’m drawn to the kulon, or palayok, an earthenware cooking vessel used throughout the Philippine archipelago, known by many different names and a source of communal nourishment. That within this clay pot we are all carried together and simultaneously sustained while being fed, one of the purest forms of Filipinx/a/o love. I use the shape of the kulon throughout my work, and it was during my time as an apprentice at The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) the summer of 2025 that I merged the motif of this significant vessel with my inspirations of my time at the Burke, through a piece I named: pusong mamon.

pusong mamon is a textile work made through the process of large scale, repeat screen printing. As an apprentice at FWM, I learned how to make a design on mylar, clean and coat screens, mix my own pigments, burn my design on an emulsion coated screen, pin and stretch fabric, set metal stops for registration and, with the help of others, screenprint my designs on several yards of cotton. For nearly three months I learned about this particular style of printmaking, a medium and process far different from my own three-dimensional practice. For my first solo project, I was tasked to design a single screen print, which became pusong mamon. I knew for the design I wanted to incorporate the kulon, but was having trouble envisioning it. It took cutting out paper shapes of different pots for me to get into the work, and as I laid them out into different patterns and configurations, I knew I had found the basis of my piece.

I then needed to come up with a background, and immediately thought of some textile works Gabbie had shown me at The Burke. It was a particular visit in which an assortment of textiles was laid out, some made of pina and natural fibers, others with intricate embroidery or batik patterns. I was, as always, thoroughly inspired, and enjoyed hearing Gabbie’s understanding of the cultural belongings. One piece in particular had these white, delicately embroidered flowers atop a sheer white fabric and I loved the flow of the plants. I took that design into my own piece, instead drawing the tropical Mimosa pudica, which I grew up knowing as hiya-hiya, or “shy plant”. Hiya-hiya is particularly interesting as its leaves will move and close if it’s touched or shaken, which fascinated me as a child when I would explore my dad’s barangay in The Philippines, encountering the pink, dew-spiked flowering plant growing all around my grandparent’s farmland. Additionally, like my time at The Burke, I also drew inspiration from a 2023 visit to Museo Iloilo. The museum is found in Iloilo City and included an exhibit on Philippine textiles of the area: from hablon, a pre-colonial Illongo handwoven cloth, to many fabrics and garments from the time of Spanish colonization. For my silkscreen design, I remembered the dainty edges of the sheer pina blouses and handkerchiefs from the Spanishcolonial period and used a scalloped border to frame the plants and pots. To finish the background, and as an homage to Washington State, where I was born and raised, I included the native plant Dicentra formosa or the Pacific bleeding heart. The flowers were drawn to hug the inside edging of the design and although they grew in an environment far different from the hiya-hiya, they both represented similar ideas I was thinking about in creating this work.

Both plants are given names that call to mind feelings of extreme sensitivity and the personification of specific human emotions and traits. For the hiya-hiya, a timidness to touch and a physical recoiling to external interaction. For the bleeding heart, a reference of a disparaging term denoting a person who is incessantly sympathetic for others experiencing misfortune, a literal connotation of the heart of Jesus Christ. To many people, these qualities are seen as a fallacy, a weakness, as something to be ashamed of. But to me, these qualities and those with a sensitive nature, are the opposite: indications and individuals of great strength. These reasons are why I decided to name the piece “pusong mamon,” a Tagalog term literally meaning a sponge-cake heart or “soft-hearted”. Much like the term “bleeding heart,” pusong mamon can be used pejoratively, as a negative characteristic, one in which a person is seen as too fragile, too compassionate by others standards. However, I don’t see empathy and the consideration of one’s surroundings in that light. Instead, I recognize that in each sensitive soul lives a being that is extremely perceptive, and that holds a great deal inside themselves. I suppose I should know, as often times throughout my life I’ve been called pusong mamon.

I know I carry so much within myself, and importantly one of the greatest things I hold inside are other people. The memories and moments that have shaped me and led me on the journey of this life, molded by others I’ve met along the way. That’s why inside each kulon of my screen print features abstractions of people, together and alone, some more visible than others. I know deep in my heart I would not be where I am today without the presence people have given me, and the ways connection and care have shaped me to become the artist I am and the person I am always becoming.

pusong mamon, June 2023. Picture taken by Carlos Avendaño and the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, PA.

Left: In the Burke Collections with a flag from the 1899 first battle of Santa Cruz, Laguna of the Philippine American War, December 2024. Right: Working in the Burke Museum for my first visit in the Artist Studio, making a found materials sculpture of the Rafflesia flower, December 2024.

Pre-colonial kulon and pottery from Museo Iloilo, taken during my visit in April 2023.

Designing my first repeat pattern at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, June 2025.

Left: Mixing leftover pigments (called “slop”) to create the terracotta color used in my print, June 2025. Right: This textile was a design inspiration for pusong mamon, seen while visiting the Burke collections with Gabbie, April 2025.

Hiya-hiya found along the rice paddies bordering the road of my dad’s Barangay in the Philippines. Taken on an early morning walk, March 2018.

Piña camisa from the Museo Iloilo, used as an inspiration for the edges of pusong mamon, April 2023.

Left: The final design for pusong mamon, drawn with various inks, pens and markers, June 2025. Right: A close-up of pusong mamon, April 2025.

Left: The negative of one kulon of pusong mamon, featuring various people, April 2025. Right: The positive of the same kulon, in which some drawings of people are lost during the screen-printing process, April 2025.

Posing with pusong mamon, June 2023. Picture taken by Carlos Avendaño and the Fabric Workshop and Museum.

Margery Cercado (b. 1991) is a queer, second-generation Filipinx artist and educator based in Seattle, the Indigenous land of the Duwamish. Her parents immigrated to the United States from the areas of Capiz and Iloilo in The Philippines. Though born and raised within and just outside of Seattle, her identity was formed by her family’s voyages back to the motherland.

Her practice seeks to understand oneself as a diasporic individual & explores themes such as colonization, labor & community through disciplines like sculpture and installation. Emphasizing natural materials, found objects and imagery associated The Philippines, Margery’s often craft-based, process-heavy work acknowledges the often-forgotten labor of one’s hands in creation and storytelling, specifically through the concept of Diasporic Longing.

She initially trained in production pottery at Bruning Pottery in Snohomish before becoming a ceramics instructor and studio assistant at Yu Tang Ceramics in Fremont. Her work has been shown in Seattle and Philadelphia, and can be found in the permanent collection of Soho House Portland. Recently, she received her MFA from the Low-Residency program at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She lives, teaches and makes in Seattle.

Learn more about her work on Instagram @margerymakes.