Maria Fernanda Nuñez Alzate (mo)
Maria Fernanda Nuñez is a Colombian artist based in Philadelphia, USA. Nunez’s media include fibers, print, and sculpture. Nunez has received support through various awards and fellowships including the Windgate Craft Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center, the Bex Frankel Fellowship from the Oregon Institute for Creative Research, the Penland Core Fellowship at the Penland School of Crafts and the North Carolina Arts Council Artist Support Grant. Their work has been exhibited at ADX Annex Gallery, Artist’s Television Access, Screaming Sky Gallery, SOMArts, Vermont Studio Center, Penland School of Crafts, R. Horner Penland Gallery, Toe River Arts Gallery, Queens University, Asian Arts Initiative Philadelphia, and Automat Collective, among others. They recently graduated from Tyler School of Art with an MFA in Sculpture.
The poet Fatimah Asghar, reviewing Yanyi’s Dream of the Divided Field asks “What is a body but a thing to be entered and exited?” The objects in my work are after such porosity and permeability. I often work with materials that I find sensorially compelling; materials that echo and sometimes try to mimic strange yet quotidian encounters such as the breaking of an egg. For this same reason, I often return to materials that welcome transformation such as wax, plant fibers, food matter, liquids, or raw construction materials. My work gives primacy to the physical and aesthetic qualities of materials, attempting to suspend purely indexical connections of form and meaning, and addressing matter’s latent capacity for relationality through subtle actions like folding, bending, resting, leaning, hanging. I see object making as a practice that cultivates relationships with materials as sites for potential intimacies and that attempts to approximate and articulate the textures of those intimacies, the edges of want and desire, and ways of knowing through the body. I arrive at objects as propositional gestures, using material in a way similar to how language is used in poetry.