RJ Fernandez was born in Manila and grew up between Manila, Baguio and San Francisco, California. Fernandez works through cameraless photographic process: paper, chemicals, light, where the material itself is made to carry historical weight.
Though she began by taking photographs, her attention has moved toward this material-led inquiry: cyanotype's Victorian-colonial optics, piña's history within Spanish-colonial trade, a technique for transferring pattern onto cloth passed down through her family's work as embroiderers for a relative's handicraft business. Working across these materials, Fernandez treats photographic materiality as a vessel for excavating personal and colonial archives at once, where labour becomes inseparable from the history it holds.
This extends into participatory and durational processes. A handwritten note from the late Filipino artist David Medalla, found among her own notebooks, led to Ginugunita Kita ("I am reminiscing you"): a collaborative, durational lumen print made through a public callout to her Hastings community, was created by exposing silver gelatine paper outside the darkroom, from stones gathered along the shoreline and placed onto the paper over the course of a week. The work continues a lineage of art as living, collective exchange rather than a fixed object.
Her documentation of gold mining in the Cordilleras examined how colonial-era industry continues to shape land and community; it was nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2015.
Her interest in the print as object also shapes Mapa Books, a publishing project she founded focused on Philippine documentary photography.
Her work has been presented in the Philippines, Singapore and the United Kingdom, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Art Fair Philippines, De La Warr Pavilion and Flatland Projects, with talks at The Photographers' Gallery, SOAS University of London and the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac.. Her work is held in private collections internationally.
She is based in East Sussex.
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Born 1979 in Manila. Lives in East Sussex.
Upcoming
2027 Drawing Room, Manila
Recent Exhibitions
2026
2026 September Lowlands part of Coastal Currents, Electro Studios Project Space, Hastings
Ginugunita Kita, Amici Studio, Hastings
The Walls Speak in Flowers, Ruup & Form
Collect, Somerset House
2025
Taking Time, Flatland Projects, Bexhill
People in Pubs, Second Act Gallery, London
YCC Collective x Refugee Week, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
Residency Show, Bexhill Art Weekend, Common Clay
2024
Nightingales, Benilde Open, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) Manila
& De La Salle College of St. Benilde