Bearing Witness To The Loss Of Home With Nadia Hernández
Photo: Gesi Schilling
‘Would you like to go elsewhere?’
‘Yeah, maybe we should move.’
Grey clouds pillowed the humid heat of day, and soon, we were pelted by a rush of rain. We didn’t mind moving from one courtyard to the next as we began to wear wet and waited to trudge through thick puddles on the busy Smith Street. We were soaking with frizzled hair when Melborune’s fickle sun began to evaporate our shirts, and we sat drinking a Mezcal Spritz, watching the thunder move away.
Nadia Hernández currently lives and works in Melbourne. She was born in Venezuela and has lived there, in the US and Australia. Her grandfather has beautiful cursive handwriting, and her mum is a great cook. Hernández thinks her mother would make a great artist or Creative Director, like a Latin American Martha Stewart – her words. We both like good art and milk chocolate, and she is currently reading ‘Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart’ by Carlos Lizarralde.
‘Why did you start making art?’
‘Out of necessity’
‘How does someone fall out of love?’
‘Out of necessity’ (Laughs).
The following conversation was conducted while sitting on plastic chairs, walking in the rain, standing under an awning and evaporating in the back of a restaurant.
Photo: Katelyn Kopenhaver
You left Venezuela at nine, lived in Tuscon for seven years and then moved to Australia at sixteen or seventeen… what a whirlwind…What does home mean to you?
Well, home to me, or the way that I explore the ideas around home, is through Venezuela, my birth country, and my family.
Have you been able to return much?
I have always felt Venezuelan, and we would have gone back after my mum finished her PhD in the States, but around that time, things began to shift politically with President Hugo Chávez, and the political turmoil became more prevalent, so she thought about where else to go. She got a job opportunity here, so we moved to Australia.
Have you kept in touch with family?
Absolutely. Mum has always valued our traditions and ‘cotidianidad’ (the everyday), which can often be lost in migration. I returned to Venezuela for six months to work with a master weaver in the final year of my fashion design degree in Brisbane. I explore my family's experiences and try to pay homage and express solidarity towards them, to retain and question aspects of my identity in and around the Australian context.
Do you think you tell these stories in a linear way?
No, not at all. I feel like I actively don't tell stories in a linear way and try to find connections between stories through a sort of unofficial timeline. Or an alternative future.
Photo: Simon Strong
Something along the lines of speculative fiction?
Yes, and they are often rooted in childhood memory. There's a quote from ‘The Latin American Photobook’ that says the Latin American landscape can't be captured in one image but is a series of mental processes. I believe this is why the feeling of home has always driven my art, manifesting itself through different mediums.
Like your use of text?
Like text. It pushes the sense of home with feelings and sensations drawn from conversations or anecdotes or a sense of everyday feelings and experiences. I had a call with my mother and asked her to describe what it felt like to wake up in the morning in my hometown. She told me, and it became a painting. They add colour to the images I’m trying to gauge.
So, they are essentially built from conversations like a landscape of images from events?
Yeah, because so much of my work is non-linear. The stories are built from fragments of sensations, memories, and mental processes, all woven into landscapes. All of it tries to describe the past or create a new image or language.
Landscapes can be wild and wobbly spiritual resources shaped by everyday culture. Is the frequent disorientation a crucial step for the art?
I think sometimes you have to be disoriented. It can be useful and necessary. Even the relationship between words, text and images is disorienting — but it helps make things different and unique. If not, there’s no surprise or encounter with new ideas.
Occasionally, having less time and space can be good. That's the annoying thing about having so many ways to explain your work… we can forget that sometimes the simplest explanation is enough. Fuck intellectualising all the time.
Exactly. I never went to art school, and I’m always like, what even is painting? Why am I painting? But it's the joy of a work that captivates you without needing words—feeling immediately transfixed by art is powerful. As an artist, everything you absorb in your day-to-day goes into your work. I don't think the painting process ever really stops. I don't switch off when I get home…actually, bouldering does make me switch off because of the danger element to it, but it's more like re-oxygenating.
Photos: Simon Strong
Intense activities open you up and make you think more clearly, especially on bad days.
And having that physical activity and clearing my mind actually leads me to know where the painting is going. In attempting to do something new or in being disoriented, you have to allow for failure, and then failure opens up doors. I sometimes actively try to fail. Now, my work is more inquisitive and open-ended. Some of my statements now have multiple meanings, and now I'm trying to let things be stirred in many different directions.
Do some directions have a positive energy versus some that are more sombre?
I think most of the time since the works are in a different language and have bold, happy, vibrant and exotic colours, they are associated with celebration and positivity, and that's probably also interspersed with stereotypes of Latin American identity. But actually, there's a legacy of artists who used murals as protest – Diego Rivera and David Álvaro Siqueiros, some leaders of the Mexican muralist movement, and Judith F. Baca, who also dealt with similar themes in her work.
They can also do both. Not everybody is going to get it, and only sometimes can we get an immediate sense of something.
I like that an image can do multiple things —it can hit you or not. But I want them to capture an energy. And that energy captures you.
I love some work in a purely visual sense, but the artist might also be trying to say all these other things with it.
And I think that's interesting in abstraction because we perceive abstract painting as steering away from reality. However, I think of artists like Jack Whitten, and one of his 32 objectives is to "learn to understand existence as being political..." The work is a conduit for all that is contained within the artist, even if one attempts to remove the self from the image.
Sometimes, it takes a while to understand Norman Lewis. You look at the work, and if you don’t understand the context, you can lose touch with what it says. You're not an artist that only has a political thing to say. You can also share images in a purely physical setting, which is something that a lot of people forget. Does your art have to be political?
It’s funny because I think my work, at the end of the day, is like self-portraiture. I'm not actively trying to make a political statement. It's a portrait…Trying to capture an everyday moment. And due to my context of being Venezuelan, being part of an 8 million+ diaspora, it naturally sets itself within a politic. What I grew up seeing, and the work I continue to adore is rooted in the everyday moment and how one can capture that. For me, the question is, how do I portray my current reality? How do I define that language? In the reflection, it is a portrait, in the amalgamation of memories and fragments, it is a landscape.
So it's a landscape and a portrait…two of the most traditional forms of painting. But it combines portrait and landscape into, realistically, a reflection.
(Laughs) Yes! It's that whole conversation around, ‘What is painting?’ all over again. And portraits and landscapes are very much just reflections of what the artist is seeing. So they are both.
In reality, what you're doing is just painting what comes to you, which is you. Which is why it's also a self-portrait.
‘It's funny because art is a relationship.’
‘A tension between control and disorientation?’
‘Sure is.’
Photo: Simon Strong
