Carmen Mardonez

About my work

As a woman, my entrails have always been governed by others. Even before I menstruated for the first time, I was taught how 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.

About myself/ Sobre mí

Carmen Mardonez (1988) is a Chilean textile artist who recently arrived in Oxford UK from Los Angeles where she lived since 2017. Her artwork seeks to radically reimagine intimate spaces of memories, dreams, and discovery, exploring variations around traditional embroidery by combining oversized formats, textile sculpture and the recovery of textile waste. 

Carmen studied History and Arts in the Catholic University of Chile, a master’s degree in Community Psychology at the University of Chile, and has training on art therapy and traditional knitting on horsehair. Her artwork has been exhibited in Brea Gallery and SoLa Gallery, among others, and her practice has been supported by scholarships and grants from "All She Makes",  "Repaint History", and "Not Real Art".

Carmen Mardónez (Santiago de Chile, 1988) realizó estudios de Licenciatura en Historia y Bachillerato en Artes en la Universidad Católica de Chile, y un magíster en Psicología Comunitaria en la Universidad de Chile. Ha participado en clases y workshops de Arteterapia, bordado contemporáneo, y tejido tradicional en crin.

En paralelo con su trabajo artístico, desde hace diez años Carmen ha sido voluntaria en diversas iniciativas de apoyo a mujeres privadas de libertad en Santiago. Durante el año 2014 trabajó en la ONG Techo, y entre los años 2015 y 2017 en el Centro de Políticas Públicas de la Universidad Católica, coordinando proyectos estudiantiles en municipalidades y cárceles chilenas. Desde Octubre del año 2017 vive en Los Angeles, California