Ryan Villamael

Ryan Villamael (b. 1987, Laguna Philippines; lives and works in Los Baños, Philippines) is an artist renowned for working with paper as a sculptural medium. With works ranging from stand-alone soft sculptures to large-scale pieces and immense installations, he has been exploring the themes, tensions, and trajectories of his chosen material for over a decade. Employing a rigorous dedication to technique and precision, Villamael uses the traditional Philippine art form of paper-cutting as a way to mediate and meditate upon history, collective memory, and the interpenetrating layers that constitute a locality. In recent works, he has expanded to explore how paper can become a locus of multiple and overlapping meanings, through which ideas on the natural world, domestic sphere, and urban landscape may be negotiated.