Teresita Fernández is a landscape artist – but these are not landscapes as we know them. Rather than a spot on a map, her understanding of the term extends from the depths of the Earth to the cosmos, and from the cellular to the psychological. Her vast mosaic panel sculptures and wall reliefs of cartographies evoke galaxies, weather systems, oceans, and archipelagos, which appear to be continually in flux. “I think of landscape as being very expansive,” says Fernández, 56, who was born in Miami to Cuban exiles who had fled the 1959 revolution, and is now based in New York. “I’m drawing parallels between the movements of the sea and the cosmos, a flow that is also replicated in our bodies’ circulatory system.”
While Fernández’s work encompasses installation and film, she regards her practice as largely sculptural. Her vertiginous landscapes lure the viewer in with their magnificent colours and textures, composed of natural materials such as charcoal, gold, wood, clay and copper, but the lush surfaces often hint at hidden traumas relating to colonialism and other atrocities. There’s a widespread assumption, she says, that landscape is something passive, pleasurable or constructed, which allows her surreptitiously to “tuck” sociopolitical commentary into her work, creating what she calls “stacked landscapes” that are layered with multiple, often invisible histories.
