Pio Abad: 'Beautiful things can be vessels for painful stories'

I grew up in Manila, in the Philippines and so I was born at the tail end of the conjugal dictatorship of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos that ruled from the late 60s to the mid-eighties.

Imelda Marcos is my muse and my monster really. She's this ghost that haunts the practice. She became incredibly well-known for her extravagance, there was the jewellery, the shoes, the real estate in New York. At some point she had the largest collection of Regency era silverware in the world.

These are legally known as the Hawaii Collection because when Ronald Reagan granted them exile in Honolulu, Imelda arrived with diamonds in diapers. She'd stashed all her jewels in her grandson’s diaper bags

There's a part of me that is drawn to the kind of visual elements that is tied to her extravagance. When you really try and unpack the fantasies that she built for herself and you kind of go back to the fantasies of capitalism and the fantasies that we are all implicated in.

My wife, Frances Wadsworth Jones who is a really brilliant jewellery designer. She plays a lot with art historical tropes in her work, really subverting the language of material. I always say I'm the project manager and she's the talent. Our shared interest in history and this kind of subversive element to our work has made it you know, the perfect collaboration.

I think we're all magpies, we’re all drawn to these shiny objects. This fascination with jewellery really is part of this larger interest in the role of seduction and its relationship to power. And in my work, you know seduction is key. You can't really get closer to the body than with jewellery. On the one hand they are these incredibly seductive, really beautiful things and these beautiful things might be vessels for painful stories.

When I think about art I think about storytelling. When I think about storytelling I immediately go to my family. My parents met as trade union organisers in the 70s, they ended up being very much involved in Philippine politics. The Philippines was so dominated by the Marcos's corruption. I think my experiences of seeing my parents struggle during the dictatorship have really shaped the way I thought.

So my aunt is the Filipino-American artist Pacita Abad. It was my aunt who was supposed to enter politics. There was this moment in the late sixties just before martial law was declared. The Abad family home was sprayed with machine-gun bullets largely because my grandfather was involved in the opposition. And my aunt at the time was a very visible student activist and that led to her leaving the country and eventually becoming an artist. And she provided that sense of possibility you know, that it was possible to become an artist.

I think the role of the Philippines in my work is central. I think that's where I grew up and that's where my politics was shaped. But this idea of the Philippines as a small world that contains many things is what I've always been fascinated with. Trying to unpack complex histories of colonialism through the intimacy of the objects. This artistic process actually begins with a heavy amount of research and I think I'm happiest when I'm in the back room of a museum sifting through things or when I'm kind of given access to these private archives that have never been seen before. At the centre of it really is drawing. This act of tracing or of using the pen to translate an object but then that shoots off to text or to 3D printed sculpture or to bronze or even to augment reality.

I usually walk from home to the studio which is about a 25-minute walk. I always think it's sort of a fascinating alternative tour of south east London through the bits of the river that people don't want to talk about. I came across a small section of a book called Brutish Museums by the curator Dan Hicks and he talks about how the British army prepared for the burning and the looting of the Kingdom of Benin. All of this was happening in the Royal Arsenal stores and the hair on my arms stood up because I was in the Royal Arsenal store, my flat was the Royal Arsenal stores. These drawings really started from that kind of drawing the bronzes but kind of equating them with things that I found in the house, whether the things I valued, or domestic objects that have less than savoury histories of extraction. What I really wanted to do was to find a way of measuring these historical objects according to personal dimensions or even emotional dimensions.

I went back the other day to the British Museum just to see the original artefacts and it's almost like they've been purposefully displayed to seem less important than they are. Like with the Benin Bronzes in particular and obviously they've been at the centre of conversations surrounding the roles that museums play now and whether, you know these sites of knowledge need to be held accountable. My home played a significant role in the way they were taken from Benin and then brought to the UK. They become both universal and very, very specific

And so these drawings kind of reflect on these objects or universal icons of cultural loss to many people, they, you know they're their lost ancestors, their histories that you can never recover.