Symbol Project
Taking inspiration from my heritage and my family’s religion, I created a set of 3 symbols encouraging religious pluralism in the Philippines.
As a Filipina-American raised in a Catholic household, religion has always been in intriguing part of my heritage. With how predominant Catholicism is across the Philippines, I never thought deeply about what religion was like before colonization. In these designs, I wanted to explore the depth of Filipino religious history prior to the introduction of Christianity.
While educating myself about Filipino religious history, I created 3 symbols to represent our religious origins and their erasure, particularly for the purpose of encouraging the presence of other religions in the Philippines. In this process, I blended concrete objects alongside abstract symbols I created to capture the depth of this history.
Components: Traced
To build off of symbols that already hold foundations of connotation and meaning, I traced over photos that I believe hold symbolic meaning for the ideas I strived to communicate through my designs.
These symbols included handcuffs to capture a feeling of being trapped, with hands in prayer to capture religion (in my context, Catholicism).
Components: Illustrated
To express ideas that a bit less easily understood, I hand-illustrated symbols to further capture the Philippines’ religious history.
The first illustration is of a balete tree with winding branches, a tree that is believed to be the dwelling place of supernatural beings in Filipino myth. The second is an illustration to represent blindness, capturing the loss of a sense when the rise of Catholicism tucked Filipino spiritualism away.
Components: Abstract
To express ideas that don’t necessarily have a tangible form, I hand-illustrated symbols that capture how I visualize them.
I represented ‘conformity’ as a fluid shape being poured into a closed circle, and ‘trauma’ as a clean, thin slash that fluidly bleeds into the areas around it. While these symbols might struggle to stand alone, I chose to blend them with other symbols.
Blending Ideas
Taking all the components I designed in the previous sections, I blended various pairs of symbols to finally land with the three symbols pictured to the right. With each of these new symbols holds a new unique meaning that can be open to interpretation.
