Leaf art refers to ephemeral works made of leaf which may have a functional as well as aesthetic use. Leaf art should be distinguished from basketry which also uses leaves, like buri palm, because baskets are made to last. Leaves are used for food wrapping, religious ritual, and modern artistic expression. The most commonly used leaves are banana, palm, and anahaw.
For wrapping food, banana and palm leaves are most frequently used. Banana leaves have a midrib and two parts of soft plant material. The ribs are usually removed. Not all leaves are serviceable; only resilient ribs are usually chosen. Banana leaves may be used to wrap foodstuffs, like the square tamales sold by peddlers, or they may be used to wrap individual servings of rice cooked in one huge pot. The trunk of the banana, which consists of layers of vegetable matter, can also be peeled off and flattened for wrapping. These may be used with banana leaves as in the wrapping of the kesong puti or white cheese. Here the soft square slab of cheese is first boxed in the strip of banana trunk, then wrapped in several layers of banana leaves, and finally tied with banana fiber. In Pangasinan, panocha or raw sugar is wrapped in banana trunk, then shaped like a gourd by tying.
More flexible and expressive than banana are palm leaves. In Batangas, buri is used for pakaskas or raw sugar. The buri are shaped like circular canisters, liquid sugar poured in and hardened, and the whole covered with buri cut into a circular shape. Stacks of these circular canisters are tied together with buri. Coconut leaf wrappers are used for suman (sticky rice cake) and puso (cooked rice wrapped in heart-shaped coconut leaf). The practice of wrapping suman with ibus (young, light unopened coconut leaves which are pliant) takes several regional forms. In the Visayas, the whole coconut leaf with midrib is laid flat, glutinous rice placed in the center, the leaf folded over it, then bound. In the Tagalog region, to wrap suman, a side of the leaf is removed from the midrib and then coiled closely to form a cylinder; one end is sealed with a piece of midrib, wet rice is placed inside, and the other end sealed. All of it is wrapped with thin strips of ibus. There are various shapes of the puso: kinasing is shaped like a heart, binaki is flat like a frog at rest, and tinigib has one flattened corner like a chisel. Woven from one or several ibus, rice is placed inside the puso and cooked. Other Visayan items that may be called leaf art are impermanent baskets for holding fruit and hats made of woven coconut leaf. In Mindanao and Sulu, the folk weave pinipig or rice-cake containers from palm leaves dyed in magenta and other hues and fashioned in the simple shape of a bird or tapering tree of life. They also weave dome-shaped food covers of palm leaf dyed in different colors.
Here coconut leaves are stripped from their stalk and used to line platforms, arched to decorate balconies and entrances, cut, plaited, and folded to create decorative shapes. Anahaw are usually tucked into walls and combined with flowers and paper to make bouquets. Aside from the town fiesta, there are three big fiesta clusters in the Philippines for Christianized Filipinos, each of which has its own uses of leaf: Lent, the Maytime festivals, and Christmas. During Lent and Semana Santa or Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, leaves play an important part. Temporary structures, called kubol in Tagalog and abong-abong in Ilocos, are set up for chanting the pasyon, a long narrative poem on the suffering and death of Christ. The kubol is traditionally made of a bamboo frame roofed and decorated with coconut leaves, plaited, and decorated with flowers. The kubol is similar to temporary structures built to accomodate guests for a meal at a wedding or a fiesta or to structures built in rice fields for resting or sleeping. In the kubol is an altar with images of saints before which devotees sing the pasyon. The Ilocano abong-abong uses vegetables rather than flowers for decorations.
Palm Sunday celebrates the entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem. For the high Mass, devotees bring their palaspas or palm leaves to church to be blessed by the priest. The palaspas are long stalks of coconut or buri palm with their fronds plaited into decorative patterns and embellished with crepe-paper flowers. A palaspas has two parts: a decorative handle and the decorated fronds from which hang the woven stars, grasshoppers and other figures from palm leaves or tiny paper flags. The decorative handle may be heart shaped or woven like a mat or folded into overlapping bows. The fronds may be cut and folded or may be
plaited to form zigzag patterns, called kidlat (lightning), espada (swordlike designs), bola (ball), ibon (bird), hipon (shrimp), and other designs similar to those found in floral offerings in Indonesia. Similar ways of decorating palm fronds are found among the Tausug who use kidlat-shaped leaves in an arrangement of fruit and flowers for weddings. The galilea, an elevated platform decorated with leaves and flowers, is built in the church patio for the choir who will sing the chants of the day. After the fiesta, the palaspas are placed on the walls, doors, or windows to drive away evil spirits and lightning.
Coconut leaves are also fashioned into children’s toys. They can be shaped as bracelets, rings, crowns, balls, trucks, or whatever anyone fancies or is able to do through folding or cutting.
The harvest festival of the Pahiyas held on 15 May in Quezon province has, as its particular feature, the decoration of the outer walls of the houses with kiping arranged in rows or as hanging mobiles and chandeliers. Kiping are thin, translucent wafers made from rice flour and molded in large leaves and dyed with different colors. Together with artistic compositions of fruits, bamboo branches, anahaw and coconut leaves, and products of the town, such as buntal hats and bakya or wooden slippers, kiping brighten the fiesta with their vivid hues. Since they are made of rice flour, they can later be fried to make a crisp delicacy. Likewise, at the windows of the houses are hung glazed bread molded in the form of fish, horses and other animals, along with strings of pastillas or milk candy and other sweets which are thrown down to the crowds when the andas (portable platform) of San Isidro passes the house.
In May, coconut fronds are also used to decorate the kubol carried by four persons to “house” the muses and queens of the Santacruzan procession. In Pulilan, Bulacan on 15 May, coconut and palm leaves decorate the carabaos which kneel before the church and the carts that they pull behind them. Coconut fronds also decorate the many stages erected for performers of the komedya or the sarswela.
On Christmas, coconut fronds, anahaw, and flowers may decorate the houses where the panunuluyan procession may stop. The same leaves are combined with cloths of many colors to decorate the stage of the Tatlong Hari play in Gasan, Marinduque.
For fiestas, coconut and anahaw leaves are used to decorate the church and altar, the arco (arches) erected at strategic points where the procession of the patron saint will pass, the kubol where the loa or poem of praise will be declaimed for the patron saint, and the stage on which the play or variety show are to be performed.
The works of contemporary artists such as Roberto Villanueva, Junyee, and Santiago Bose, make much use of leaves to convey ecological meanings. Leaf art also signifies a grassroots cultural context different from urban ways of thinking. Many other artists have experimented on expressive possibilities of leaf and its transitoriness, thus adding popular expression to the repertoire of the professional artist. • A.G. Guillermo