The gold comes later. What strikes first is the cardboard.
Before the shimmer of 23-karat gold leaf, and before the familiar grammar of Catholic arches and Renaissance composition, there is the sagging and imperfect surface beneath it all. The cardboard is creased. It bows slightly under the paint, remembers its former life. In Hallowed Be Thy Name (2023), Marikit Santiago does not conceal this support; she allows it to show itself and breathe through the surface of the painting. For some viewers, cardboard might read as temporary — disposable, cheap, waste. For others, especially those raised in Filipino migrant households, it carries a very different gravity. Cardboard is not waste. It is storage and protection. It becomes, in Santiago’s work, a material that collapses the divide between the domestic and the sacred, challenging the hierarchy that traditionally separates ‘low’ materials from fine art.
In Filipino homes, cardboard is kept ‘just in case.’ It reinforces balikbayan boxes swollen with tinned food, hand-me-down clothes, and the soft weight of obligation otherwise known as ‘utang na loob’ (loosely translated as ‘debt of gratitude’). It lines drawers, props up shelves, and becomes the material of school projects and makeshift repairs, holding things together when nothing else will. Through adversity, cardboard is strength. In Santiago’s hands, this material — one that is so often overlooked — becomes the foundation for sanctity. The painting does not simply sit on cardboard — it is held by it. The sacred does not float above the everyday here — it is built from it. This gesture alone reorients the material hierarchy of Western portraiture that is so often seen in state institutions such as oil on canvas or sculpture made from marble.
At the centre of Hallowed Be Thy Name, Santiago paints herself with her three children beneath a gilded arch that recalls a church altar or devotional niche. The figures are rendered with an almost disarming realism: bare feet grounded against the surface, clothing that evokes Barong-style formalwear, faces calm but watchful. Each child holds a dangerous Australian animal — a taipan, a crocodile, a blue-ringed octopus — their small hands steady, unflinching. The danger is quiet, but it reminds us that the landscape the children inherit is not neutral and a part of their learned experience.
This compositional tension recurs across Santiago’s practice. In other paintings such as Apple of My Eye (2021) and Pinay(2024), intimacy and threat sit side by side — motherhood is staged not as softness alone, but as endurance and negotiation. Children appear often in her paintings; not as symbols of innocence but as both her collaborators and those who inherit her work. They draw directly onto her canvases, their markings interrupting her surfaces. Their presence refuses polish and their vulnerability shines.
In Hallowed Be Thy Name, the uncanny familiarity of a formal family portrait is unsettled by this undercurrent. The gold arch promises reverence, yet the animals suggest caution. The painting swings between devotion and warning. It feels less like a declaration than a holding pattern, where a mother steadies herself within contradiction. Catholic iconography also saturates Santiago’s work, but it is never uncritical. Gold leaf, halos, arches and altarpiece compositions persist across her paintings, yet they are consistently reoriented. In Hallowed Be Thy Name, the divine is not distant or abstract. The divine becomes embodied — maternal, tired, watchful and present.
The title, drawn from the Lord’s Prayer, is impossible to read innocently. “Hallowed be thy name” is a phrase shaped by repetition, one that signals reverence without requiring reflection. In Santiago’s work, this reverence is displaced. Rather than directing devotion toward a patriarchal figure, the painting locates it within the familial, elevating the mother and her children into a position that echoes (but ultimately disrupts) the logic of saintly veneration. In Catholic doctrine, holiness is tethered to the Father; authority is inherited through patriarchal lines, and names, too, are passed down accordingly. Similarly, within Filipino custom, maternal surnames are often erased at birth, absorbed into paternal lineage without question. But Santiago breaks this chain. She has given her children her surname, a decision that is both deeply personal and silently radical. In this painting, naming becomes an act of authorship. The mother does not merely nurture; she inscribes.
As a Filipina-Australian viewer myself, this custom resonates beyond the frame. Many of us carry our fathers’ names by default, even when our mothers did the labour of holding families together across migration, language loss and cultural dislocation. Some of us carry our mothers’ names only in fragments — middle names and maiden names are remembered, but not spoken aloud or reduced to an initial. Santiago’s painting makes this absence visible. It restores the maternal name to the centre of the image, insisting that origin is not singular, nor male. Here, the mother is not just subject and artist — she is the point of beginning.
The children’s drawings, scattered across the background foliage, disrupt the illusion of mastery. Their scribbles are loose, playful and unfiltered. Santiago has described these contributions as “low-level,” but their presence feels anything but minor. They interrupt the singular genius of the artist’s hand, and embed collaboration into the work itself. This gesture echoes throughout Santiago’s practice. In Milk Teeth (2020) and Family Tree (2022), surfaces are layered with interruption — stains, scribbles and textures that feel lived-in rather than perfected. Her paintings accumulate time rather than erase it and behave more like households than monuments.
We encounter similar gestures in other works by Santiago, currently on view in the women artist-led exhibition And Still I Rise at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The physicality of her paintings becomes unmistakable within the gallery space. Plyboard bows slightly under the weight of paint and gold leaf, while the spontaneous drawings of her children surface across the composition like hushed interruptions. Standing before them, the works feel less like finished images than living surfaces — exchanged between the lines of artist, mother and child. What appears devotional from afar reveals itself, up-close, as something more fragile and collaborative: a painting built not only from iconography, but from the textures of family life.
For those raised in Catholic homes, this reconfiguration feels faintly seismic. The rituals remain — with prayer, repetition, reverence — but the hierarchy shifts. The altar is no longer oriented toward a distant patriarch. It is grounded in the labour of care. Holiness is not transcendent; it is domestic. The cardboard returns, insistently.
Covered in gold leaf, the material does not disappear. Its dents and folds remain visible beneath the sheen and refuses to be smoothed over. The transformation is not one of disguise but elevation. Santiago does not redeem the material by making it unrecognisable. She makes it sacred as it is. This gesture mirrors the logic of migration itself. Balikbayan boxes are wrapped, taped and reinforced, yet they always reveal their wear. They bear the marks of travel, arriving bruised but intact. In Santiago’s painting, cardboard becomes an altar — not despite its history, but because of it. The gold here also does not signify wealth, but value. It canonises what has long been dismissed. Motherhood, migration and domestic labour are not peripheral to the painting’s meaning — they are its substance.
Hallowed Be Thy Name does not resolve its tensions. It does not soothe nor does it offer relief. Instead, it asks the viewer to sit within discomfort — between faith and fury, protection and danger, sanctity and exhaustion.
Santiago’s broader practice resists the image of the solitary artist. Her paintings are crowded with children, symbols and materials that refuse refinement. They feel transferred rather than composed. In this sense, her work mirrors the realities it depicts. Motherhood is not a singular act. Diaspora is not linear. Identity is not inherited cleanly.
Upon approach, recognition arrives slowly in front of this work, not as spectacle, but as accumulation of materials: the cardboard, the gold, the children’s marks, the animals held too calmly, the mother who does not disappear into the background. In galleries where brown bodies are often absent — or flattened into ethnographic symbols — Santiago’s painting feels like a reclamation, not only of visibility, but of value. It honours the invisible, unrecorded gestures that shape lives: the folding of cardboard, the repetition of prayer, the decision to name oneself on one’s own terms.
In a world that so often demands gratitude without rage, Hallowed Be Thy Name insists on both. It allows sanctity to coexist with struggle. It reminds us that holiness does not require purity, only presence.
And sometimes, it begins with cardboard.
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Arianne Leonor Bulanos is an arts worker, curator and writer based on unceded Dharug land. Her work spans exhibitions, public programming and arts writing, with an interest in contemporary art, community-led practice and cultural storytelling. She works across institutional and independent contexts and contributes writing on exhibitions, artists and local arts ecologies.