Not Real Art

Today, we welcome another one of our six 2021 NOT REAL ART Grant for Artists winners, the one and only Carmen Mardónez, hailing from Chile. Carmen is a fiber artist living in Los Angeles, California, whose work explores an imagery of rebellion and freedom through natural landscapes saturated with lights and colors. She employs a characteristically wild freestyle embroidery method combined with other traditional knitting techniques to create sculptural works using materials ranging from canvas to discarded objects and surfaces, such as lemon bags, old t-shirts, and more recently, castoff bed sheets and pillows. In this episode, you’ll learn about the work that Carmen has done with incarcerated women in Chile and how she was impacted by those experiences. She also shares what she loves about her home country, what it was like growing up in an ‘artsy’ family in Santiago, and her decision to be a stay-at-home mom while also pursuing a career as a professional artist. We also touch on Carmen’s approach to self-car