Alma Silueta en Fuego (Silueta de Cenizas) by ANA MENDIETA. Super-8 colour, silent film, 3 mins.

“My art is grounded on the belief in one universal energy which runs through everything; from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.”

– Ana Mendieta 

ART AS RITUAL. Best known for what she referred to as her “earth-body” art works, Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) was a pioneering Cuban American artist fusing performance, video, sculpture and photography, and practicing art as a form of ritual and communication with the forces of nature. In a short but highly prolific career, Mendieta produced over a hundred works between 1972 and 1985.

For this first UK retrospective, Mendieta’s works are now on view at the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition, Ana Mendieta: Traces. Born in Cuba, Mendieta was sent to America as a child, an exile whose repercussions are felt throughout her work. Poetic, visionary, political and spiritual, Mendieta’s work explores existence and identity through the elements of nature, in works capturing sex, rebirth, life, death, love, exile from Cuba at an early age, and resurrection.

Traces at the Southbank Centre notably presents her photographic series Siluetas, which was shown as her first major solo exhibition in the 1970s.

Created between 1973 and 1980, Mendieta created the earthly portraits presented here in Iowa, USA and Oaxaca in Mexico. Marking her own form into the earth, the series enacts an organic dialogue between the natural landscape, the elements of Fire, Water, Earth and Air, and the female body. An essential self portrait of Mendieta’s body is sculpted, carved, outlined, incised and moulded from an amalgamation of materials and forms such as earth, mud, feathers, flowers, wax, leaves, ash, branches, shells, grass, gunpowder, ice, rock, moss, sand, blood, water, and sometimes, set on fire.

‘I wanted my images to have power, to be magic,’ said Ana Mendieta. ‘I decided that for the images to have magic qualities I had to work directly with nature […] This sense of magic, knowledge and power found in primitive art has influenced my personal attitude toward art making. For the past twelve years I have been working out in nature exploring the relation-ship between myself, the earth and art.’

Ana Mendieta: Traces is now on view at the Hayward Gallery Southbank Centre. 24 September – 15 December 2013

Text Sophie Pinchetti

All Photographs © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection
, Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Quotations by Ana Mendieta from Viso, Olga M. Ana Mendieta: Earth Body Sculpture and Performance, 1972 – 1985. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Smithsonian Institution. Hatje Cantz Publishers. 2004.