Filipino artist Ramon Orlina's spectacular artworks are the ultimate in recycling. A Manila glass factory shuts down two of its five furnaces regularly for him and in he moves with his jackhammer.
It's a back-breaking task but what he extracts from the pit of the furnace are dull chunks of waste glass, sheet-glass 'cullets'. 'The furnace is so big, about 150 square metres, it's like a road paved with glass,' he says.
In what was once going to be a garden in Orlina's Manila workshop just out of sight of the jeepneys, cars and buses, there's a heap of what he chisels out of the furnaces. The bigger blocks of it weigh up to 250 kilograms. And what this rubbish is eventually destined to become is massive glass sculptures in emerald, pink, blue and even black.
In Manila, he's created the eight-metre high glass-steel-concrete work Oneness, for the Cultural Centre of the Philippines. There are huge works in Japan at the Hakatea Museum and Theatre, and on the mainland at the China Hotel in Guangzhou. In Singapore, there's a massive, 75-square-feet glass and bronze installation, Quintessence, at the Art Museum, filling a four-metre by two-metre gothic-shaped window with odd-shaped glass blocks up to 20 centimetres thick. Possibly the largest glass sculpture in Asia, his The Fertile Crescent stands at the main entrance to Singapore's National Stadium, four-metre high glass blocks set in a steel frame.
Best known are his works in the Ning-Ning series, modelled on women's breasts and named after his second daughter, who provided the inspiration while being breast-fed by Mum, Lay-Ann. Lately, there have been Rubic cube-like, wedge-shaped blocks. At Galeriasia until September 2, as part of a Salute To Summer, Part 2 exhibition which features several intriguing Asian artists, Orlina shows his Hawk (pictured). Recently he's begun gradually moving into more multi-media works involving steel and bronze.
It's all a long way from the way his career started out. Orlina, 55, gave up his architectural practice after 10 years to pursue a childhood dream of becoming an artist. 'I wanted to do fine arts when I was young but one had to be practical,' he says. Making the switch-over wasn't easy. At first he painted on glass, then moved on to sculpting it. He had to start everything from scratch, improvising his technique as he went along. But his architecture training actually hasn't been lost - it plays a large part in his work. 'My training helps me to deal with the technicalities and the chemical properties,' he says. 'It's a combination of instinct and science. I don't do sketches. I look at the glass and work directly on it, putting in pen marks here and there for the pieces to be cut off. If there are big parts to be lopped off, my assistants do it.'