Pugad engages with the necessity of movement and migration that is ingrained in human history. As personal cartography, the images sewn together represent an imagined world that recalls our historical significance as sailors, traders, and voyagers. It is a map of fragments and possibilities–of areas discovered and uncharted embodied in cyanotype prints and fabric.
The cyan-blue evokes the maritime nature of exploration while the textile patchwork emulates the collapsing, or conjoining, of land and potentiality. Image of nature composes an environment of familiarity and comfort that is confronted by displacement. Modernity has trivialized the exertion involved in migration. Pugad seeks to add nuance to the diasporic experience necessitated by survival. Systematic and societal realities force a person into another world–a rite of passage where one carries the hope that the distance from home will be exchanged with the assurance of an improved life. Despite the expansion of experience and discovery, the interwoven prints show the physical connectedness being threatened. Leaving entails reconciliation that there are borders that cannot be recrossed. The fluid-like lines on the map reflect the mutable nature of transcultural undertakings. In the process of mitigating the distance by seeking the familiar in a foreign land, a person also returns as a stranger to their own people. Pugad’s melding of images and fabric demonstrate the transitory nature of a space one wishes to inhabit–a sought outstate of being home.