Jelina’s first introduction to the art world in 1998 happened out of necessity and her longing for a sense of belonging to a new country. She immediately found solace and reassurance through her artworks. She combined contemporary and conceptual art processes and the craft-making of her unique design. Her work explores the modern fascination of raising environmental awareness and her desire to use art as a catalyst to increase gender equality and equal rights for women and cross-cultural understanding. She describes herself as a transdisciplinary combining theory, visual art, surface designing and traditional arts and culture. Her interests are in the association between Textile/Fibre sculptural wearable art and surface designing, both experimental exploration of using sustainable & recyclable materials. The beauty of Australian surroundings and her upbringing as a Filipino are the sources of her perseverance and resilience. The association and qualities of Jelina’s artworks and their evocation envelopes every inch of her artwork and are directly linked to traditional knowledge of weaving that Elders have passed on. Each element of her works evokes a metaphor as a woven image using threads, fibres, paints and fabrics to create an astonishing palette of colours and textured surfaces. The result is rhythmic stitches that produced an integrated figurative form of images and well-blended colours entwine with knowledge and story to tell a more in-depth level. Her artworks illuminate inherently multidimensional, creative, interactive, and dynamic processes.
