By Arnesia Young on April 30, 2021

“Flood (Déferlante),” 2020

“My work is very much about the feminine. And it is very feminine. Big, feminine, unstoppable—in size and color. Unconstrained, unapologetic.”

Argentinian visual artist Ana María Hernando has been surrounded by fabrics from a very young age. Growing up in a family that owned a textile factory—where she spent many summers working as a teenager—it is no surprise that this influence would find its way into her art. Since becoming a visual artist, she has worked in a variety of mediums, including painting, drawing, printmaking, and even incorporating poetry into her work. However, it was only 20 years ago that she began to explore textiles in her artistic practice.

“Waterfall,” 2020 (Photo: Rachel Berkowitz)

“Textile came to me in a more sculptural way,” Hernando tells My Modern Met. “I began to do small, experimental installations at first. I started by incorporating embroideries. This is when all these memories of my grandmothers and my mother getting together to sew or crochet throughout entire afternoons at a time, hit me. I felt such a strong connection to this ritual of women coming together to do their craft and the place for this in their lives, and its cumulative, ongoing nature. It’s such a ‘transportable’ task. It’s the immediacy and the simplicity of it, how easy it is to bring it with you. Two needles and the threads will do. It strikes me as an adaptive and organic activity… I have been drawn to the energetic element of it as well, how textiles observe so much the energy of those working them and the actions of everyone in contact with them because of their porous quality. I believe this happens as a result of the very manual nature of textile working.” […]

“Solo escuchaba el aire (Only the Air Was Heard),” 2020

Continue reading: Billowing Tulle Floods Unexpected Spaces With Feminine Power