Patricia Fernández is an artist born in Burgos, Spain, who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work includes a research aspect out in the field, as well as a painting and object making studio practice. Her works emerge from an interest in history, texture and time contained within landscape. She 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, the work reveals the inaccuracy of our inherited memories and the subjectivity of personal experience. Painting, drawing, carving and object making are the tools used to recuperate an unknown history.
She is a recipient of the COLA-IMAP (2023), Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), Pollock Krasner Grant (2017), California Community Foundation Fellowship (2011), and France Los Angeles Exchange Grant (2012).
Her project box (a proposition for ten years), is a time based sculpture that expands for ten years. Fernández has been copying her grandfather’s carving style as an active archival pursuit. This interconnected practice where a pervasive “x” motif repeats, is a transmission of memory and history between two people spanning different generations and different worlds.
In a collaborative effort, her grandfather sends her letters with drawings and cardboard maquettes of pieces he wished he could carve but cannot due to his deteriorating eye-sight. Her wooden sculptures are from her grandfather’s studies, memory objects that are transformed and carry her grandfather’s mark into the future.
As loss permeates the transmission of memory, history and ideas, things forgotten may also be regained through the same unstable reiterative processes that allow them to fade away. Carving, rewriting, painting are all labor-intensive actions that are inherent to her practice. This work speaks to intergenerational correspondences and adopted traditions that shift, slip, and alter over a single lifetime.