Marikit Santiago’s practice signally focuses on overlaying her lived Filipina-Australian experience onto the canon of Western art history. Her work is unquestionably personal (compositions depict her family and are made with her children) and undeniably courageous (self-portraits are neither idealized nor stylized). 

Santiago’s paintings are simultaneously humble in materials (oil paint on recycled cardboard) and osé in content (biblical narratives often reframe Markit as Eve, her husband Shawn as Adam and her children as grappling with temptation and sin in the Garden of Eden).

By combining the narrative power of Catholicism with her first person account of bare life, Santiago’s emotionally-charged works call into question the preconceived dualities of utopia and dystopia, control and transgression, duty and autonomy, sex and sexual difference, paradise and exile.

Santiago’s practice is dedicated to her children — a love letter to both her family, her culture, Australia, and Figuration-writ-large. While the experience of motherhood is individual and unique, Santiago’s work presents motherhood as a universal and inclusive platform, simultaneously unifying the experiences of many and revealing her personal bond with her children.

Marikit Santiago (b. Melbourne, 1985) lives and works in Parramatta, Sydney, Australia. She won the prestigious Sir John Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery New South Wales in 2020 and was a three-time finalist for the institution’s Archibald Prize (2016, 2021, 2023). In 2024, she was announced as the recipient of the La Prairie Art Award, in which her work A Seat at the Table (Magulang) and A Seat at the Table (Kapatid) (2023) was acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Her work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions including The kingdom, the power, Bendigo Art Gallery (2023), We Eat This Bread, Fairfield City Museum and Gallery, Fairfield (2022 - 2023), and For Us Sinners, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Haymarket (2022).