Mylen Tumaliuan-Huggins’ paintings hold a quiet tension between stillness and motion. In Presence, her current exhibition at Piano Nobile Gallery in Phinney Ridge neighborhood (on view from March 9 to May 22, 2026), movement is shaped by internal and external shifts and through careful attention to what exists in between.
Huggins’ collaboration with the materials she works with — oils, encaustic, monotype, and mixed media — unfolds like a dance, fluid and in harmony. She moves with the material (such as pigmented wax) along the surface of the hot plate, embracing shifts, repetition, and reimagining as she discovers the intrinsic nature of each medium. “I investigate what it means to move with intention (when painting) while accepting material and still arrive at having the freedom to make choices or having agency.” She experiments with how they work individually or in tandem, whether it is “the flow of heated wax, or the resistance of oil stick, the translucency in each created through layered depth.” This care for material underscores her observation of the world through the visual vocabulary of line, color, space, balance, rhythm, and composition.
Here and There and Come to Light are subtle, pastel-colored compositions; a delicate luminosity permeates the works. I am reminded of Monet’s water lilies, and I share this with Huggins in our conversation at Piano Nobile Gallery on a spring morning where the cherry blossoms are in full bloom. She is warm, affable, and a wonderful storyteller. As it happens, these paintings have emerged from her keen observations of the lily pads at Green Lake across shifting seasons at various times of the day. “The light is different, the objects on the water are different, the transparency of the water is different, and depending on the angle I am looking towards the water — it’s never from above you, it’s always from the side — there’s so much drama that happens in that lake. I don’t imitate it. I think my past paintings have imitated or tried to illustrate that, but the transition from trying to illustrate what I see to a painting was hard. To reference a memory, the feeling or the idea of that place is much easier for me. There was a lot of letting go with these paintings.”
Her observations extend to other works where structure and rhythm are more pronounced. The 12 x 12 oils on paper — The Act – Back and Forth, Act – Come Upon, Act – In Circles, and Act – Like an Aura are the smallest works in the exhibit, the only ones defined by a framework that still retain the sense animated energy that runs through all of Huggins’ works. “Circles keep coming back to me”, she says. “I think it’s the act of movement that is so prevalent. It’s really the essence of my work and just seems so natural.” Huggins started experimenting during COVID when a friend of hers, a mosaic artist, was making mirrors and discarding the circles from the frame. Though the shape is “constrained, it is also infinite at the same time. There is a meditative aspect to gesturing and moving paint in a circle. You have boundaries, but you also don’t; you can keep going. Wax, when heated, is such a fluid medium that you can just play with it.”
Movement, the leitmotif of her artistic practice, is a mapping of the internal/external, the emotional/physical. The external movement is embodied in her observation of nature, in the texture of the cracks in the mountains of Mazama, Eastern Washington, or the grace of falling branches. It is moments like this that spark curiosity and deepen the relationship with her work.
In Place, In A Certain Moment, In Time, In Tending, and In Flight are monochromatic works with splashes of reds, greens, and yellows. These paintings are restrained in their color palette, in contrast to the more vibrant “red” paintings such as Scaling Upward, Pivoting, Slow Stroll, and Switchback. What connects these paintings is not only the energized squiggles — feverish lines and streaks of vivid color — but also Huggins’ ongoing inquiry into what happens between things: how space itself can be made visible within the composition. The exploration on negative space is born from this meditation, to fill the shapes between. In works like Set in July 12th and Set in July 25th, the red lines inform how she approaches this contemplation of presence in absence.
The Japanese concept MA (間) speaks to a deliberate pause between things or actions, a gap to let breath in for balance and harmony, to accept and welcome the stillness and quiet. “I pay attention to the space in between because they have a voice and they speak,” Huggins said. “In the end, I find a certain balance in the composition because balance is also hard to achieve.”
This persistent preoccupation with the in-between spaces extends beyond her practice, into lived experience itself. Huggins speaks of a complicated internal movement shaped by migration. Her body holds the trauma of displacement and cultural transition when she moved to the U.S. at the age of 14. She speaks of an aesthetic distancing from her Filipino heritage. It is not consciously intentional, but “it could be that my practice is influenced by what or who I read about, my lived experiences, relationships, and interests.” She is drawn to calligraphy, especially Japanese, and she recently discovered an ancient Filipino script, Baybayin. In a poignant moment in our conversation, she confides how movement is a metaphor for presence in her work, a part of her history. “I have moved. I am inside the work. Sometimes it is intentional. But what is not intentional is my moving here. My immigration was not a choice.” A throughline in her practice is not to make meaning out of it but to recognize this movement through the lens of an immigrant. “Why am I here? How did I get here? I pay attention to the spaces in between,” Huggins says. “I try to show up without reservation, with grace, to move between intention and emergence, through cultures/sub-cultures of Detroit, Chicago, Connecticut, Seattle; an all-girls Catholic school in Manila to a coed American high school, art school, preppy, pop-rock, punk-rock, grunge…mother, wife, teacher, artist, and daughter.”
Huggins’ practice resists resolution and conformity. In Presence, she does not dissipate the tension between movement and stillness but holds it without assigning a fixed meaning to them.
“Presence” is on view until May 22 at Piano Nobile. Visiting hours: Mon-Fri 10-4 pm or by appointment.
