The chest tightens when we are angry. Our stomachs flutter when we think of someone we love. An object can bring us to a place we have not visited in years. The body may already remember it before we even speak the thought into recollection.

The Garden of Us brings together the works of Jael Laura, Ron Mariñas, and Natasha Juliano in an exploration of somatic memory—the ways in which past experiences can persist in the body, often outside conscious recollection. In this exhibition, the artists consider these embodied traces and the ways they continue to shape how we encounter ourselves and the world around us.

The exhibition draws, in part, from the idea articulated by psychiatrist and researcher Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score: that experiences can leave lasting imprints on the body. Rather than illustrating this idea literally, however, The Garden of Us approaches the body through suggestion and allegory. Plant forms and references to the body appear subtly throughout the works, evoking the body as a site of growth and remembrance.

Like a garden, the body holds what has been planted, what has taken root, what has been pruned, and what continues to grow despite our attempts to forget. It is also a space shaped by relationships: what we encounter, what we nurture, what we allow to remain, and what we choose to let go. Memory, in this sense, is neither fixed nor entirely accessible. It is something living—something that can resurface, change form, and reveal itself differently as we move through life.

For Jael Laura, the garden of memory reaches back into childhood. Her figurative paintings return to a time when tenderness could exist in the imagination of a younger self, while simultaneously confronting that self from the vantage point of the present. Her works become a conversation between who she was and who she has become, centered on the reassuring voice that every younger version of ourselves might need to hear: “you’re on the right path.”

Laura’s paintings acknowledge the childhood dream of becoming an artist and the obstacles that might have otherwise hindered that path. In revisiting this younger self, she offers it recognition. Her works find tenderness in affirming the hopes of our younger selves.

Ron Mariñas approaches memory through the cycles of human relationships. His works mirror a movement from solitude toward connection: we begin life on our own, eventually encounter others, and form relationships with people who may help us grow or, at times, contribute to our undoing. These relationships leave their own traces, shaping the person we become and the ways we understand belonging.

The series remains open-ended, resisting a single resolution. Instead, Mariñas offers possible conclusions and lingering threads, particularly through images of hands holding flowers. The gesture suggests both giving and receiving, care and consequence. Flowers, as the very products of a garden. Proof of what has been cultivated. In these works, relationships can be understood as gardens of their own: places where something may be nurtured into bloom, allowed to wither, or carried forward into another season.

Natasha Juliano’s four works form a quadriptych whose sequence functions simultaneously as clue and conclusion. The progression invites viewers to consider how tools offer us possibilities and choices, and how those choices, in turn, shape the paths we take. This encounter with objects becomes a reflection on agency: the decisions available to us, the decisions we make, and how we use them to make our lived experiences.

Together, the three artists approach the body as both witness and participant. Laura looks backward toward the tenderness of the child she once was; Mariñas considers the people who become part of us as we move through life; and Juliano reflects on the choices and tools through which we shape our own paths. Their works differ in subject and approach, but each considers how experience settles within us and continues to influence who we become.

The Garden of Us can be an allegory for how relationships themselves are a garden that should be tended to; And it also asks us to attend to what the body knows before we do. These artists acknowledge the body’s capacity to feel a variety of emotions before language can make sense of them. It asks us to consider memory not simply as something we carry, but as something that lives within us: planted by experience, shaped by others, tended through our choices, and continually growing.

Written by Marz Aglipay