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Santos explores ideas of self-hood that embrace multiplicity, hybridity and transformation through a reflection of movement, migration and change, while considering the fragmented yet empowering relationships to heritage. Immigrating to Canada from the Philippines at a young age serves as a departure point for her considerations regarding identity, belongingness, discrimination and oppression, as well as the tether to a culture and ancestry graspable only through enactments of memory.

The images in her work negotiate narratives of the past and present through a diasporic lens and result in the creation of a personal myth–a visual vocabulary influenced by the Filipino and Western folktales of her early youth, sensorial connections via taste, smell and texture, Filipino traditions both commonplace and revered, and the geography and landscape of both her homeland and present environments real or imagined. Like the woven textures continuously present in her work, she will speak of the intersection between self-awareness and the celebration of plural identities, connection and community, labour, vulnerability, and care, which all come together to represent the lived experience as multifarious and influx and become necessary within a structure of resilience and repair.