Vanessa Carrera
Printmaking/Grabado
The voices, stories and art projects of the indigenous women of Mexico, the Nahua codices and my roots are some of the themes I repeat in my prints. My work is culturally based on my heritage of being an Itzocan woman, born and raised in the Mixteca, Poblana in Puebla, Mexico. The hummingbirds, the bougainvillea flowers, the Popocatepetl volcano, and the tree of life are elements that I also repeat, gradually creating a bond of resistance and community with them. My work shows these themes and
elements in a practice based on printmaking and paper installations.
I use an iterative drawing process to illustrate the Tree of Life with different themes and elements. My use of relief woodcuts allows me to explore an idea or my investigation themes by repeating different variations of that same idea. Using repetition helps me better understand each Tree of Life concept I want to communicate and the hieroglyphs I can add or remove. My use of monotype expands this exploration of repetition, through the use of stencils and by my engaging with painful discriminating experiences and memories. By repetitively expressing these difficult memories, I am not only examining the pain, but I am also building resilience for myself and other Indigenous women. My most recent prints have been displayed as paper installations of the Tree of Life and the Popocatepetl volcano from Puebla, Mexico, where I create an opportunity for dialogue with myself, opening a path to understanding my community, my roots, and the elements that create resilience in me. The act of continuing to repeat these themes in my work is therapeutic, allowing me to process trauma and foster a space of recovery.
The Tree of Life is a ceramic piece that dates back 365 years and is representative of Itzocan, Puebla, with a symbolic charge of fertility and abundance, but with my drawings, I convert it into wood or paper stencils. The Tree of Life drawing is repeated using a woodcut relief process to study it and think about what I want the tree to communicate. I explore other drawings of hummingbirds, the Popocatepetl, and bougainvillea flowers in monotypes, drawing with ink directly on plexiglass, narrating my memories and the stories of indigenous Mexican women. These stories are told to me directly by Indigenous women from Itzocan and stories in documentaries by other Indigenous women in different parts of Mexico, which represent both gender and cultural resistance. Bookmaking is a new aspect that I am integrating into my practice. I study and preserve hieroglyphics that are found in different Nahua codices, such as the Borgia, Mendoza, and Florentino codices. I fold a long strip of printmaking paper to form a group of pages and using woodcut relief and monotype I print traditional hieroglyphics and others created by me.
My work is always presented open to the community, allowing the audience to have a calm but curious experience to know more about what the Tree of Life is and inviting them to create their tree and add their elements of resilience.
Biographical statement
My desire to honor the voices, stories, and art projects of the indigenous women of Mexico, the Nahua codices, my roots, and the tree of life led me to integrate various traditional and expanded printmaking processes into my practice as an act of preservation of these themes. During the years 2020-2024, I took several printmaking courses at the University of North Texas (UNT) and learned traditional and contemporary printmaking techniques. All the classes I took promoted my creative research development and creation processes. I researched the Tree of Life; a ceramic piece with colonial and pre-Hispanic symbolisms; like the hummingbirds and bougainvillea flowers that abound in Itzocan, Puebla, Mexico, where I was born and raised. I also research hieroglyphs from the Florentino, Mendoza, and Borgia codices to continue preserving them. Within these investigations, my interest arose to also learn about Mexican Indigenous women and their artistic careers and how we resist a system that discriminates against us for who we are and how we look. This year, in 2024, after earning my BFA, I attended JupiterFab Art Residency in Guadalajara, Mexico for a month during the summer. I put on an art exhibit called Connection, Desire, Love, and Longing; To Create is to Resist, where I made a series of six relief and monotype prints and collaborated with the Coyote Press workshop run by Rodrigo Gonzales, professor of communication at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. This project focused on two aspects, one is giving visibility to indigenous lesbian women and the different ethnic groups that exist in the state of Puebla, Mexico. Upon my return to Irving, Texas, I became a docent at the Irving Archives and Museum, and the Irving Art Center, and a volunteer at CIMA Arts (a collective created by a group of Chicana/Mexican-American artists). My most recent academic activity has been being part of the open portfolio for the Mid America Print Council in Manhattan, Kansas. I attended print workshops and lectures where I learned the benefits of implementing eco-technology in the printmaking technique, to maintain a friendly relationship with the environment. Likewise, I attended PrintExpo 2024 in Austin, Texas, where I was part of the open portfolio as a member of the Printmaking Association of North Texas Students (PANTS).