Banua (2026) engages with the collection of Chicago’s Field Museum, a major repository of artefacts from the Philippines. Zooming in on a women’s top constructed from carefully knotted mother-of-pearl buttons – an ornamental craft practised by an Indigenous people from the island of Mindanao – Abad abstracts object into pattern. The resulting image field feels cosmological and archipelagic, encompassing the multiple resonances of its title, a recurring word across the Austronesian diaspora that describes a fluid sense of belonging rooted in but not bound by geography, and carried through rituals and practices. The work establishes kinship across centuries through the shared conditions of craft, and through the embodied time and repetitive labour invested in both constructing the artefact and translating it into drawing.