Carmen Mardonez

About my work

As a woman, my entrails have always been governed by others. Before I even menstruated for the first time, I was taught to sew, knit, and embroider, in order to become a caring wife and an exemplary mother. No one asked me if that was my plan. After unexpectedly getting pregnant, all the rebellion against the conservative and religious education I received since my childhood furiously exploded. I refused to become what I was raised for. I reclaimed my right to be seen as an artist, using the very tools that were supposedly just for women’s craft, and my practice became a way of expressing my resistance.

In my work, I use embroidery as a pictorial medium, exploring ways of deconstructing traditional embroidery to allow for less patterned, more experimental techniques, where color and relief are more important than mimesis and practical domestic use. My raw materials turned from classical canvas to discarded objects and surfaces, such as lemon bags, old t-shirts, worn-out pillows, and cast-off bed sheets. Most of these raw materials are collected from the donations of neighbors and the local community, a circulation practice I started during the pandemic as a way of community building and care amidst physical isolation, and that has now become essential to my work. My art is rebellion, but it also wants to be a soothing and surrounding experience.

I started my art career relatively late. After completing a bachelor’s in History, I left halfway through my Arts bachelor's with an Associate Degree. At the time, I was simply not sure I wanted to be an artist. I was working on the ground in favor of immigrants, unhoused, and incarcerated people, and nothing seemed further away from these urgent social causes than the preciosity of fine arts. During my 20s, I went onto working in public policy with nonprofits, and later completed a Master’s in Community Psychology specializing in restorative alternatives to incarceration. I kept my creative practice for myself, not yet knowing how to interweave it with my earthly interests and commitments. It was the coincidence of my own international migration and motherhood that triggered my return to the arts.

When I moved from my native Santiago, Chile, to Los Angeles, California, carrying a newborn and leaving behind my professional career, I experienced a new urgency to find my voice through my artistic practice. Over the following six years, I embroidered frenetically. My creations became unframed, unbounded, and overflowing. I started experimenting with materials and formats, first venturing outside the limits of the hoop, then repurposing textile waste as my medium, and finally exploring with soft sculptures and oversized textile installations.

In this process, I finally found ways of connecting my art practice to my social, political, and ecological concerns, both through the themes and the materiality of my production: I seek to connect people, to create awareness that our destinies are interweaved, a connection only made possible by exposing the vulnerability of our wildest dreams, utopias of liberation and sisterhood.

About myself/ Sobre mí

Carmen Mardónez (Santiago, 1988) is a Chilean textile artist based in Oxford, recently relocated from Los Angeles, where she lived from 2017 to 2024. She studied History and Arts at the Catholic University of Chile and holds a master’s degree in Community Psychology from the University of Chile. Her practice explores themes of rebellion and freedom through oversized freestyle embroidery, fabric sculptures made from textile waste, and immersive textile installations that envelop the viewer in color and movement.

Her work is deeply informed by everyday life — by her love of vivid colors, swimming, dog walking, Chilean cakes, and children’s books discovered in bookstores. She has intentionally shaped a practice that allows her to create alongside her child and dog, embracing their presence as part of her creative rhythm. This coexistence between art and domestic life becomes an extension of her textile language: intuitive, endless, and alive.

Carmen has received support through numerous grants, scholarships, and artist residencies, and her award-winning work has been exhibited in curated exhibitions across the United States and Europe. She is currently preparing her first solo museum exhibition at Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, scheduled to open in spring 2027, generously funded by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.