Carmen Mardonez

Carmen Mardónez Artist Statement

 Before I even menstruated for the first time, I had already been taught in my primary school how to sew, knit, and embroider. I had to develop the necessary skills to become a caring wife and mother: no one asked me if that was my plan. As a woman, my entrails have always been governed by others.

 When I unexpectedly became a mother, all the rebellion against this rigid conservative and religious education, hidden in the depths of myself, irremediably exploded. I refused to become what I was trained for.

 My artistic work then became another way of expressing my resistance. I engaged with embroidery as a pictorial medium, and my practice as a textile artist seeks to avoid meeting any practical needs. My raw materials turned from classical canvas to discarded objects and surfaces, such as lemon bags, old t-shirts, and more recently castoff bed sheets and pillows.

 In my current work, I explore ways of deconstructing traditional embroidery to allow for less patterned, more experimental techniques, where color and relief are more important than mimesis and practical domestic use.

 I embroider on bed sheets and pillows, radically intimate spaces that store memories of dreams, exploration and discovery. These objects have witnessed the materialized, embodied repression, byproduct of centuries of indoctrination we have experienced as women through history. They also accompany our restless nights, when the horrors and the injustices do not give us truce. But even more importantly, bed sheets are the space of our wildest dreams, utopias of liberation and sisterhood.

See Carmen speak about her art, background, and practice.