How a Los Baños artist shares ‘ginhawa’ through art for over a decade

Resumen detallado

From carving fallen trees in Los Baños to teaching art from her home, Yvette Co keeps Ginhawa Craft Studio going, strongly believing that artists nurture people’s emotional well-being

MADASALIN. Yvette Co sits beside “Madasalin,” one of Ginhawa Craft Studio’s wood sculptures, in Los Baños, Laguna.

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Walang pera sa art (There’s no money in art). It is a line Filipino artists often hear, and Yvette Beatrice Co understands where it comes from.

For Co, money is only part of an artist’s purpose. It is a belief she has carried for over a decade as the founder of Ginhawa Craft Studio in Los Baños, Laguna, where she makes and teaches art.

Co, an interior design graduate of University of the Philippines Diliman, had joined group exhibits in Manila for over a decade before she moved to Los Baños around 2010. Wherever she had settled, she said, she would have started making art, since being an artist was already part of her identity.

She named it Ginhawa Farm Arts and Crafts around 2011. The studio ran from 2012, with paintings and woodwork as its early focus, and was registered with the Department of Trade and Industry in 2015.

For the woodwork, she brought in two carvers from Paete, the carving capital of the Philippines. Wood carving had yet to reach University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB), and she wanted people to see it up close.

Los Baños also had the material. In Paete, cutting trees was banned and wood was expensive. In UPLB, typhoons brought down trees that no one was putting to use.

A German friend from the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity, who knew woodworkers in Germany, suggested she ask the dean for the fallen wood and offer an artwork in return.

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