Patricia Fernández
Artist Statement
My work uses personal narrative, memory, omission, and abstraction to transmit histories and build connections between people and places. By applying an archeological approach to the family archive, my work reveals the inaccuracy of our inherited memories and the subjectivity of personal experience. Painting, drawing, carving and object making are the tools that I use to recuperate an unknown history. By creating installations, the sculptures and paintings in my work become layered fragments of an experience, the ephemera of a subject’s identity formation, the conflation of time and place. The collected pieces act as a continuation and a product of the transmission of ideals and histories. Like the copier of the copier of the copier, ad infinitum, I reconstruct a new form, with the purpose to investigate the memories that are misremembered. Each element on its own, and also as a part of a larger ongoing collection, builds the narrative that serves as a recuperation of history.
While At Headlands
During my residency at Headlands I will continue to research and document the history of militarized sites through the subjective acts of drawing, writing and painting. My current work consists on walking over the French-Spanish Pyrenees mountains to investigate how we actively write landscapes from what remains- through experience- and how we transform place through constructions of personal narrative in history. The starting point for my work at the Headlands is a series of walks I will carry out in the National Park; here, I will continue to focus on both the political and psychological impact of military sites in the writing of history and in our contemporary society. Working in the traditional role of “sketch” artist in the field I will record the history of the landscape and its military sites, weaving together fragments of my experience and gathered historical narratives to assume a responsibility for this history.
