All Photos By Gail
Argentinian artist Ana María Hernando creates sculpture in an abundance of tulle — the sumptuous fabric netting — inspired by natural forms and transformed through the sewing process. Across the lawns in Madison Square Park, the artist realized a series of beauteous, atmospheric clouds and a cascading waterfall that float above and alongside viewers. This public art project inaugurated the twentieth-anniversary year of Madison Square Park Conservancy’s art program, launched in 2004!
Tulle is a material often associated with hiding secrets by concealing aspects of women’s identity. In petticoats, tulle was the unseen layer that helped enhance a woman’s waist but hid her legs under a voluminous skirt silhouette. Tulle is also traditionally sewn into bridal veils so that the wearer’s face will be carefully masked behind a scrim of white.
Hernando first used tulle in her work in 2016; this followed her creation in 2009 of a towering sculpture for an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, what she calls a “feminist mountain” of petticoats, built in collaboration with women from Mollomarca in the Peruvian Andes. In her ongoing work and now in Madison Square Park, Hernando is revising long-held associations for tulle, advancing new meaning by daylighting a fabric that has often been engaged to guard aspects of gender.
Hernando has other goals for To Let the Sky Know / Dejar que el cielo sepa. In response to the bleak cityscape of wintertime, she inserted tulle sculptures of vibrant coloration and buoyancy as symbols of hope, growth, and fluidity. Her sculptures beckon with their seeming fragility and evanescence; ultimately, their durability takes hold of our memories.
The artist recently described how sitting alongside generations of women during her childhood in Buenos Aires inspired the materials and process in her current work:
I grew up surrounded by textiles: my grandmothers and my mother would get together in the afternoons to sew and crochet, and as a teenager I spent summers sewing in my maternal grandparents’ small textile factory that had begun in the 1920s. Because of the influence of the women in my family, and my recognition from working at the factory that we can make something better together than alone, I am attracted to and admire circles of women who have gathered over the centuries to collaborate and accompany one another.
Hernando directs her sewing process toward optimism, as an emblem of opportunity and invincibility. Handworked textiles and wares are an inspiration, as Hernando generates sculpture in response not only to ephemeral forces in nature but also to the work of women in Latin America and the Latin American diaspora — from the embroideries of cloistered nuns in Buenos Aires, to the weavings and other crafts of Peruvian women in the Andes, to the contributions of the artist’s communities in Denver.
To Let Sky Know Closed on March 17th, 2024
