GAMABA SPOTLIGHT:
Magdalena Gamayo
About The Artist
Magdalena Gamayo, 96, embodies
centuries of history and culture in Pinili, Ilocos Norte. She was born in 1924 and is a skilled weaver of the inabel cloth, a historical cotton fabric bartered for gold in the Galleon Trade and described in the ancient Ilocano epic Biag ni Lam-ang. She has been a mag-aabel for almost 80 years, having learned the skill at the age of 15 by watching her aunts work at the height of the Second World War.
Magdalena has now polished her talents on her
own, teaching herself classic inabel designs like as binakol (whirlwinds, her speciality), inuritan (geometric patterns), sinan-sabong (flowers), and kusikos (spiral forms). She has also trained herself to recreate patterns in the absence of a sample to which she can refer. Her unrivaled grasp of inabel weaving was honored in 2012 when she was awarded the GAMABA, or National Living Treasures Award. She is now one of just 16 honorees.
Magdalena and the inabel have a long history. She not only shares the art with her ancestors, but it also helped her survive
the war and heal from the death of her only child. And her strong connection with the inabel manifests itself in her artistry of fabrics weaved exclusively with the purest of intentions - never in haste, never in carelessness.
She has always emphasized the importance of patience and devotion in her work, which is obvious in the mathematical
precision of her elaborate patterns. The abel weaving procedure is already difficult and time-consuming. The weaver handpicks and organizes the various colored threads on the pedaled loom, ensuring that the correct number of the right colored threads are properly and uniformly spaced, and synchronizes the action of their hands and feet for the wooden loom to operate properly. A minor blunder, such as an extra thread or a misplaced color, might derail the entire design.
Magdalena, on the other hand, continues to command the abel with unequaled competence, even though her eyes are
approaching a century old. An abel fabric must outlast decades of usage for the master weaver, therefore Magdalena highlights the need of looking for robustness while selecting threads. Her designs are the most detailed, and she may use up to five distinct colors. Her paintings have regularly displayed patterns that are as delicate as they are lively, thanks to a high and exact thread count. Her approximately 80-year association with the abel ensures a rich and unrivaled variety of abel weaving techniques and designs. And, no matter what method or pattern she chooses, Magdalena ensures that her works retain the accuracy, sturdiness, and enthusiasm that have made her art a national living treasure.
However, given Magdalena's age and the conditions in her village, the survival of abel weaving is challenged by the advent
of change. Handwoven inabel fabric must today compete with low-cost, mass-produced material. While the inabel has been exported to Asian and European countries, adorned international fashion shows, and continuously made its way into Ilocano families, weavers continue to worry about a lack of a market for the inabel, claiming a lack of finances to acquire materials as a result. It should also be highlighted that Magdalena is already old and suffers from age-related diseases. Despite this, the master weaver continues to pave the route for the craft's survival.