Interwoven States is an ongoing body of work by New York–based Filipina American artist Rose Cameron. The collection reflects a personal and cultural journey—an effort to reclaim a fragmented identity shaped by displacement, assimilation, and the enduring pull of memory.
Born in the Philippines and immigrating to the United States at the age of 12, Cameron faced the overwhelming pressure to abandon her native language, traditions, and identity in order to belong. Interwoven States emerges as a response to that erasure—a visual reclamation of the life she was once asked to forget.
Drawing from her childhood experiences, Cameron’s work honors the rituals, colors, language, and people of her homeland. At the heart of her practice is the art of basket weaving, a tradition passed down from her mother. Used symbolically and structurally throughout her paintings, weaving becomes a protective and expressive gesture—a textured veil that obscures as much as it reveals. Through it, fragments of cultural memory and emotion surface in abstracted forms, creating a tension between concealment and revelation.
The sampaguita flower, a recurring motif, embodies the values of love, dedication, and truth—qualities she associates with the resilient women of her culture, especially her mother. These symbols are interlaced with Cameron’s contemporary abstract expression, forming a layered narrative that invites both introspection and interpretation.
Working primarily with acrylic, Cameron constructs each canvas through a process of layering, erasure, and reapplication. The surface becomes a site of excavation, where personal history, memory, and cultural inheritance are simultaneously obscured and uncovered. Her compositions evoke depth, rhythm, and tactile complexity, offering only glimpses of what lies beneath—echoing the lived experience of those navigating identity between worlds.
Interwoven States is ultimately a meditation on memory, migration, and the power of cultural continuity. Through it, Cameron reclaims what was lost, and in doing so, transforms it into something enduring and deeply her own.