Ann Pamintuan hones her mastery of the metal craft.
Ann Tiukinhoy Pamintuan, an accomplished artist, is an expert at the meticulous art of metal weaving, and is renowned for her innovative designs and craftsmanship. She has won many awards for her artworks, which reflect a synthesis of modern and traditional Asian ideas and styles. Her amazing pieces have helped propel and bring acclaim to Philippine design in the highly competitive international arena. The City of Davao has proudly served as her golden gateway into the burgeoning furniture, home accessories and jewelry market of the Philippines. “I started my company, called Gilded Expressions, relying on a small sum of start-up capital as an experiment in entrepreneurship. I operated and conducted the business from the garage of my home. I guess I must have used the design instincts inherited from my father when I started producing my fashion accessories which were made from electroplated exotic blooms, leaves and roots,” said Ann.
Ann’s early line of strongly sculptural jewelry was ingeniously crafted from Davao’s indigenous materials and was creatively designed to possess intimate scale and wearability. Beautiful, unique and exquisite is how one can describe Ann Tiukinhoy Pamintuan’s prized jewelry line. Plant life has been a major source of inspiration for the artist, as she drew upon the distinctive blossoms of Davao’s orchids, as well as the leaves and roots of various other plants, capturing their gesture and grace. In these living organisms, you find the contrast between delicacy and strength, which reflects the persona of this talented artist.
Ann confessed that she arrived at her current work through a slow evolutionary process of trial and error. “The only thing I studied was electroplating which I needed for my early jewelry production. I followed a circuitous route for my artistic endeavors.” But Ann’s strong aesthetic vision, combined with a love and passion for her wearable artwork, fueled her creative juices all the more – ensuring her success. “I’ve learned to suppress my need to constantly evaluate my works. I’ve learned to rely on my instinct and just work,” she confessed.
A series of her ergonomically designed furniture pieces, which she named the “Cocoon Collection,” evidenced the beginnings of a vital artistic sensibility. Ann’s initial contact with Mindanao’s tribal weaving inspired her to incorporate these techniques into her art form. Her heightened sense of design in creating the Cocoon Collection from raw material, and seeing it develop row by row, wire by wire, metal strip by metal strip into a metal woven fabric for the Cocoon Lounge Chair, was well worth the ordeal she underwent at the start. Her unique Cocoon Collection was adjudged the Best in Craftsmanship by the New York Editors’ Guild in the ICFF New York in May 2001. The collection also earned the Good Design Award presented by the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization. In Moscow, Ann won the Best Product Award at the FIDEXPO in April 2002.
It was in that same year that Ann Tiukinhoy Pamintuan received her Golden Shell Award, given by the President of the Philippines in special recognition for her being “the first Filipino/Asian designer to be featured in the prestigious International Design Yearbook (17th Edition, International Design Yearbook 2002, London).” Ann Tiukinhoy Pamintuan’s Cocoon Collection was also included in the Graphics Product3 Design Series, a collection of the best product designs in the world from 1998 to 2003, published in New York in 2004. Ann believes that there is a lot of mileage to be had through participating in exhibits and competitions, as these are places wherein she can benchmark her skills against the best talents from throughout the world. Competitions, she says, also give her the opportunity to explore shapes, forms and concepts that are not restricted only to market demands. As if to prove that her initial awards were no fluke, Ann Tiukinhoy Pamintuan produced equally stunning works in her Lasso Collection, Oxygen Collection, Ann Tiuk Collection and Ginko Collection. The international audience embraced her designs, and more awards came her way when she took these proudly made-in-Davao products abroad for exhibit and design competitions.
With her well deserved international recognition, came commissions from some of Manila’s most reputable establishments. Ann Tiukinhoy Pamintuan has left her artistic mark at the Fil-Invest Country Club, Hyatt Hotel and Casino, Inagiku Japanese Restaurant, and Byke’s Café, to mention just a few. “I take much pleasure in these commissioned works,” she confided, then added, “It feels great to see a person wearing one of my pieces but if someone never wore it and just wanted to own it, I would have just as much gratification.
