CLOTH. METAL. WOOD. A look at design’s future through the past

At first, interior and lighting designer Mark Wilson thought it was plywood — this table that had been in his dad Claude Marion Wilson’s trading office in Cebu for 30 years. It was four and a half feet wide, it had foam nailed to the top’s edges, and the legs were “basura.” It was about to be either thrown away or donated to the Boy Scouts. 

But there was something about this table that just clicked in Mark’s mind. After further investigating the wood, he found out it was solid narra — this old species of wood that is so integral in Philippine historical houses, or even just our ancestral homes and commercial buildings that have long ago been torn down.

Mark looked at the wood and thought it could be upcycled and repurposed. He wanted to give new life to found wood, and it didn’t end there.

Today, this table to which Mark has given a new lease on life — beautifully bleached to light yellow, a process that took 24 painstaking stages, and added with milled steel legs in contemporary lines — is part of the exhibit called “Cloth. Metal. Wood,” opening on Nov. 6 at W17, the home store owned and run by Kaye Tinga and Andy Vasquez Prada.

“We’ve always wanted to highlight the creativity of Filipino designers and this is a great opportunity to introduce artists who are expanding their works,” says Kaye. “We want W17 to be known for that and to share our space with the designers.”

Mark is the wood part in the selling exhibit with three pieces: two long dining tables and a coffee table made from an old gilingan.  Ian Giron, who did embroidery for Josie Natori’s fashion house for 13 years, is the cloth part — this time silk screens with gorgeous embroidery. And Tata Montilla is the metal part in the form of paintings without paint; instead they are silver leaf on paper or wood and treated with chemicals. 

Mark conceived of this exhibit a year ago, when he settled back in Manila after practicing interior and lighting design in New York and LA for 14 years. “All day we are touching glass and steel, plastic and polyester, so it’s nice to go back to wood, silk, and silver leaf —  how nice to go back to materials of the past, to nature.”

Mark and Tata have known each other since they were 10 years old, Ian and Mark met only last year.  “I’ve known Tata since we were kids, through horseback riding. Tata does mirrors for interior designers such as myself, and he’s been making silver-leafed paintings — it’s tunay na silver leaf, because a lot of times they’ll call it ‘silver leaf’ but it’s actually aluminum because that’s much cheaper. Ian Giron handled the embroidery for Josie Natori and so he’s lived between New York, Manila and Bulacan. All our works are handcrafted.”

As Ian Giron transitioned from fashion to decorative arts, he pondered using the skill of his Bulakaeña embroiderers and this old material. “What happens if I combined the different elements of silk threads, raffia straw, coconut beads and employ our techniques such as the paltik and ikat embroidery stitching?”

The results are rich classical and baroque floral motifs with exotic and mystical symbols from the Orient.

Ian says, “I was also inspired by Dadaism, the art movement in the early 20th century, and the post-modern. I wanted to produce modern, contemporary designs and what I’ve come to realize is that Philippine embroidery fuses our link to Spain. Our deceptively realistic take on Spanish arts and crafts serves as the motif for our very own unique blend of Filipino-meets-western aesthetics. The beauty of Philippine embroidery lies in how we harmoniously and almost lyrically combine our motifs and symbols with western elements.”

Tata Montilla first studied gold and silver-leafing techniques in San Francisco in 1994. His artworks at W17 look deceptively like paintings from a distance, but if you look at them closely, you can see the squares of the silver leaf and you realize that the colors are from industrial chemicals thrown on the surface. He applies silver leaf on wood or paper so the color under the light is slightly different.

“I constantly have images in my mind that consist of patterns and colors,” Tata says. “What drives me are media that have remained unexplored. With these pieces, I’ve combined the traditional methods of gilding to achieve colors and patterns through an oxidation process that comes from the unconventional application of chemicals to the gilded surface.”

For Mark Wilson, going back home after not seeing his son and daughter for years and living away from the country for more than a decade (through no choice of his own), also meant going back to the craftsmanship of the past. For this, he went to Pampanga, home to some of the best woodcraftsmen in the world.

“I worked with furniture designer and chef Claude Tayag on the tables.  When we removed the foam, the nail marks were exposed and I was agonizing with Claude whether to cut the table because people might object to the marks, but Claude and my then boyfriend Andre said, don’t.”

The dark marks actually look natural, as if they were part of the grain and give the smooth finish of the wood more character.  “For me, it’s part of the adaptive reuse story,” says Mark.

But he also wanted the table to be longer, and so he had Claude’s workshop add supa, a very old hard wood that came from the stairs of an old house in Pampanga.   

The legs came to be designed that way almost by accident. When Mark was lifting the table on the edge, Claude said, “Don’t lift at the dugtong because that’s the most vulnerable part of the table. So Mark designed linear legs made from milled steel. He named the table “Claudio,” after his son.

 “What’s nice is that because the design is very minimal, the table can blend with any style in the room or with any chair.”

Another repurposed wood is the coffee table made from an old wooden gilingan. When Mark saw the gilingan upside down, he noticed that it had a very textured, wavy surface. And once again, the idea of upcycling clicked. He named this one “Andre,” after his ex-boyfriend. Why not the current one? He laughs and says, “Because I don’t have one, I’m single again.”

Mark, whose training is interior design and later he took his master’s in lighting design in New York, has established his own firm here called We Design. “My primary motive for coming home was to reestablish my relationship with my children, and also to take advantage of the boom here.”

In fact, Mark is very excited about the future of design here. “I’m very motivated by the material itself, the clients’ needs and the state of our earth which requires us to be very conscientious about using materials. So why not use old things? We have to buy quality and get rid of our throwaway mentality. There’s something very fulfilling about an empty house — and people filling them up slowly.”

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“Cloth. Metal. Wood.” goes on exhibit at W17, La Fuerza Compound, Pasong Tamo on Nov. 6 and will run for two months. A portion of the proceeds from the exhibit will benefit the literacy charity Teach for the Philippines.

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