Born in Montalban Rizal, the Philippines, Rodel Tapaya (b. 1980) graduated from University of the Philippines, before travelling to University of Art and Design (Helsinki, Finland) and Parsons School of Design (New York City) for further studies. In 2001, Tapaya won the Grand Prize of the Nokia Art Awards Asia Pacific. Since 1999, Tapaya has been actively participating in solo and group exhibitions.For this series of works, Tapaya draws inspiration from native stories, myths and folklore of different indigenous tribes, and retells them in a diorama. Each diorama resembles a ‘retablo’ (altarpiece) and a house on stilts, setting the stage to tell indigenous stories within a folk Christianity. ‘Origin of Grain’ is a myth about how the barren Earth got her first grains. Labangan, a mortal, pleaded to the sky god, Kabuniyan, for food, who threw a line for him to climb to the other world for a meal of rice, under the condition that he was not to bring back any to Earth. But Labangan defied Kabuniyan and thus began the cultivation of rice on Earth.
