Patricia Fernández is an artist born in Burgos, Spain, who lives and works between Los Angeles, Joshua Tree and Madrid.
She is an interdisciplinary artist with a research-based practice who creates material contexts to record encounters and relationships through painting, sculpture, and installation. Fernández records exchanges and timekeeping; the passing of time through birth and growth, as well as aging and decay of our own bodies and those of our loved ones. 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. Her everyday practice continues an embodiment of temporality, exploring inter-generational dialogues, care and our understandings of phenomena.
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 sent her letters with drawings and cardboard maquettes of pieces he wished he could carve but was unable to complete due to his deteriorating eye-sight. Her wooden sculptures are often based on 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.