Nadia Hernández
Home is an easy concept for some, but for Nadia Hernández, who left her birthplace of Mérida, Venezuela, with her mother in 1999 for Arizona, before settling in Australia, home is a manylayered thing. “Home to me is the place where I feel spiritually and physically grounded,” she says “Home is a place that I’ve conjured in my mind, filled with fragmented memories and hopes of what could be. Home is the place where many roads meet. Home is in part all the places where I’ve lived. Home is this home where I write from now, but may not live in tomorrow.”
And home is her work, a buffet of dizzyingly vibrant mixed-media compositions that have won Hernández much acclaim. In 2023, she was a finalist in both the Ramsay Art Prize and the Sir John Sulman Prize; the year before, she was one half of a two-person exhibition, , at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. But accolades are by no means the goal. Rather, her art is an exercise in preservation and protest. This is the genius of Hernández’s colour, which speaks first to joy, and then to nostalgic agony. Works like (2018), (2022), and (2023) are tinged with grief; in declarations for liberty, strewn across
