A Pilgrimage through Art School by Hannah Delos Reyes

Artist’s Bio

 Hannah Delos Reyes is a Filipino-Canadian artist and educator currently based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Born in the Philippines and immigrating to Canada in 2017, Delos Reyes is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Manitoba after completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Brandon University. Her artistic practice is deeply informed by her experience as a first-generation immigrant and explores Filipino culture, identity, memory, and the continuing relationship between pre-colonial histories and contemporary life. 

Working primarily in painting and drawing, Delos Reyes also explores printmaking, ceramics, and other interdisciplinary approaches to making. Her practice often considers how cultural traditions, personal experiences, and inherited histories shape an individual’s sense of identity and belonging. Over the past several years, she has developed a diverse body of work through academic projects, commissions, exhibitions, and independent practice. 

Alongside her studio practice, Delos Reyes is actively involved in arts education and community engagement. She has taught art at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba and independently through Hannah Delos Reyes Fine Arts, offering classes and workshops in communities throughout Southwestern Saskatchewan. She also worked as an Art Connects Tour Guide at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, facilitating conversations and hands-on responses to exhibitions, and currently works as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Manitoba. 

Delos Reyes has participated in exhibitions and arts programming in Manitoba and has received numerous scholarships and academic honours throughout her undergraduate and graduate studies. Her work has also been commissioned and collected internationally. Through both her artistic and educational practices, she continues to explore ways of connecting personal and cultural histories with contemporary experiences of place, identity, and community. 

Artist Statement: Pilgrimage of Art School 

Pilgrimage of Art School is a collection of artworks created throughout my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Brandon University. Bringing together works from the beginning to the end of my undergraduate education, this exhibition traces not only my development as an artist, but also the personal experiences, questions, failures, discoveries, and relationships that shaped me along the way. 

I chose the word pilgrimage because art school felt less like a straightforward path and more like a long journey toward something I could not fully see at the beginning. Like a pilgrimage, it involved uncertainty, repetition, detours, exhaustion, and moments of discovery. Each artwork became a marker along that journey. A record of where I was, what I was learning, what I was questioning, and who I was becoming. 

As a first-generation immigrant from the Philippines, my experience of art school was also intertwined with my changing understanding of identity and belonging. My cultural background has remained an important foundation of my practice, particularly my relationship to Filipino history, traditions, memory, and the effects of colonialism. At the same time, living and studying in Canada introduced new environments, perspectives, and ways of understanding myself. These experiences often appear in my work directly or indirectly, through imagery, materials, symbols, and personal narratives. 

The works in this exhibition were not created as one cohesive body of work. They were made at different stages of my education, sometimes in response to assignments, sometimes through personal exploration, and sometimes simply through the desire to understand what I was capable of making. There are works that I now see as experiments, works that challenged me, and works that opened doors to ideas I continue to investigate in my MFA practice. Together, however, they form a visual record of my education. 

Looking back at these works now, I am less interested in judging them individually as successful or unsuccessful. Instead, I see them as evidence of becoming. They document the gradual transition from learning how to make art to understanding why I make it. They hold the uncertainty of being a student, the pressure of trying to become an artist, and the joy of discovering that making art can be a way of understanding myself and the world around me. 

Pilgrimage of Art School is therefore both an exhibition and a reflection. It is a collection of places I have been, questions I have asked, and versions of myself that existed throughout my BFA. By bringing these works together again, I am revisiting the path that brought me here, not as a finished journey, but as the foundation for where I am going next.