As a magpie, a forager, Miguel Aquilizan relates his love of found materials back to the Philippines, where his family are from. There, he says, things are never thrown away, but endlessly repurposed and reanimated. He happily cannibalises his old works to make new ones. Everything is in flux.

Aquilizan incorporates anything and everything into the artworks: the raw and the cooked, expanding foam and piano keys, fibreglass and foliage, carved fruit and fake plants. He carves and models, arranges and assembles, constructs and deconstructs. Things that don’t go together get together, cross pollinate, and beget. His works have a mysterious, magical quality, with one foot in science fiction and the posthuman, another in totemism and animism, suggesting art from a distant time or place.

On the one hand, Aquilizan seems to have a punky disregard for conventions. On the other, his work is grounded in them, gleefully riffing off art-historical precedents. Expanding-foam forms recall fragments from classical statuary. Plywood shapes overlap suggesting cubist space. Like Brancusi, he puts objects and their contrasting support structures into conversation—plinths and stands are never neutral. It’s never quite clear where Aquilizan is taking us, or if he knows. He says, ‘I like obscuring and mutating what is familiar, making everything alien.’

Aquilizan is a member of the family art collective Fruit Juice Factori. His work featured in the Institute of Modern Art show Platform. Recent group exhibitions include Unusual Suns, MO_ Space, Manila; and Material Culture in a Material World, Outer Space, Meanjin/Brisbane; both 2023. He lives and works in Meanjin/Brisbane and in Los Baños in the Philippines.

His 2021 solo exhibition I Am That I Am was shortlisted in the 2021 Ateneo Art Awards Fernando Zobel Prize for Visual Art.