Silverlens New York is honored to present State of the Nations, the first U.S. solo exhibition of renowned Philippine artist Geraldine Javier. Javier’s exhibition will be on view September 10 through October 24, 2026, with an opening reception on September 10, 6–8 PM.  

“Every morning the artist Geraldine Javier with her dog Freya starts work by walking out into her garden to gather leaves, flowers and occasionally bits of bark. “Garden” here may not be the most accurate word. She lives in an old farm 2.3 hectares (5.7 acres) large, and now calls herself an “artist-farmer”. 

Over the last four years eco-printing has been so consuming a medium or process that she has had no time to paint. Eco-printing means to press the sap or pigment of leaves, roots, flowers and bark into paper or fabric. “I hope the audience will delight in nature and share my concern at the damage of it,” says Javier. Employing and supporting those people who live in her compound or the local barangay and who embroider (ten on this project), garden, or otherwise make the work possible is central to her. “It is very important to me that this work is very handmade and made with natural materials,” says Javier, “It is important to show that things like this can only be made by hand.”

Javier finds hope also when she sees people and communities working with nature, setting up community kitchens, growing organic vegetables, working for democracy, making things by hand, caring for others. As Rebecca Solnit recently suggested, “Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war.”” 

Words by Tony Godfrey

Geraldine Javier (b. 1970, Makati City, Philippines; lives and works in Batangas, Philippines) is one of the Philippines' most important and widely collected contemporary artists. She first earned a Nursing degree from the University of the Philippines, placing among the top scorers in the national licensure exams, before committing herself to an art practice. After two decades as an artist in Manila, she moved to an old farm in Batangas, building a home and studio there to reconnect with the land and the people around her. On this farm, where orchards of native trees and a garden growing vegetables to help sustain the surrounding community coexist, she has become what she calls an "artist-farmer.” Javier's farm is a deliberate site of collaboration, generating employment and training for the embroiderers, gardeners, and assistants and the local community members whose hands help realize her work. Currently central to her practice is “eco-printing”, a laborious, hand-based technique of monoprinting by pressing the sap and pigment of leaves, roots, flowers, and bark directly into paper or fabric, which she and her collaborators then overlay with intricate embroidery. Her natural hand at growing and foraging combined with the painstaking handcraft put into each work embodies the intimate, sustaining relationship between artist and nature, and her community-rooted way of living and creating echoes the caregiving of her origins as a nurse.

Javier has been the subject of more than thirty solo exhibitions across the Philippines, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, Germany, and China, and her work has appeared in major international biennials including the Helsinki Biennial (2025), the Bienal de São Paulo (2023), the Havana Biennial (2018), and the Prague Biennale (2009). From 1999 to 2003, she was a member of the artist collective Surrounded by Water.