The Pole Boatman

In The Pole Boatman, the figure draws from a scene visibly encountered in Lapu-Lapu City, Cebu, where small boats and the labor of those who navigate them remain part of the coastal landscape. The repeated motion of pushing the boat with a pole becomes a meditation on the cycles of work that sustain communities shaped by the sea. Seen from the artist’s hometown, the work considers how these seemingly ordinary gestures carry histories of livelihood, place, and inherited practice. The boatman becomes a figure of persistence, embodying the quiet labor through which local ways of life and cultural memory are continually sustained despite a changing and increasingly degraded environment.