Carmen Mardonez, Imaginary Topographies, 2021
GO BEHIND THE SCENES WITH TEXTILE ARTS LA MEMBERS IN ‘LIVE AT THE STUDIO’, A SERIES OF 20-MINUTE LIVE-STREAM STUDIO TOURS! *this tour will be pre-recorded
Thursday, September 16th, 2021
12 noon PDT All tours run approximately 20 minutes
LIVE ON INSTAGRAM @desbordado
Join Textile Arts LA member and textile artist Carmen Mardonez for a conversation about her studio practice with a focus on the materials that she works with.
ARTIST STATEMENT
As a woman, my entrails have always been governed by others. Before I even menstruated for the first time, I was taught to sew, knit, and embroider, only to become a caring wife and exemplary mother: no one asked me if that was my plan. After unexpectedly becoming a mother, all the rebellion against the conservative and religious education I received since my childhood furiously exploded. I refused to become what I was trained for. My artistic work became a way of expressing my resistance.
I engaged with embroidery as a pictorial medium, exploring 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. 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 practice, I experiment on going even beyond freestyle embroidery, combining it with three-dimensional pieces such as fabric sculptures, made using textile waste, and increasing the format of my creations to produce textile installations. Using bed sheets and pillows, I seek to connect with these radically intimate spaces that store memories of exploration, discovery, and suffering. These textile objects have witnessed the materialized, embodied repression, byproduct of centuries of indoctrination we have experienced as women through history. But even more importantly, they are the space of our wildest dreams, utopias of liberation and sisterhood.