NAVA ARTIST FILE: NADIA HERNANDEZ
Transcript

Nadia:
So my name is Nadia Hernandez
and I'm an artist.
My practice I guess is about like my family,
my heritage, it's about place.
I'm originally from Merida Venezuela so I make a lot
of work about the place where I was born and also
what it means to be like a Latin X person in this
place that I now have it.
I work with a lot of mediums, mainly textiles,
oils, a bit of sound as well in collaboration
with like other artists.
I also work with paper and in the past I've
painted murals, so it's kind of a little bit of everything.


WHAT'S BEEN A TURNING POINT IN YOUR CAREER?

Nadia:
Every year since I've decided to, I guess pursue an
artistic practice has brought about a sort of turning point
because the work itself and the choice to pursue this
type of career brings a lot of instability.
I think you kind of have to look at small moments
in time.
This year, turning point
there's been a few.
I think one joining the first draft board of directors
has been an amazing because it's brought me
closer to an artistic community, led me to meet
a lot of other incredible artists and like art practitioners,
curators, writers.
Every time I have an exhibition, I think
that's a personal turning point because it's like creating
a new body of work.
This year, one the churchy that was pretty cool
and that I think will, yeah bring hopefully
a bit of like maybe it'll give me a break
to kind of continue to pursue my practice
without constantly feeling worried about it, yeah.
Like a few profound moments have come
from listening to music.
And I think that the composer and artist that
continues to inspire me and constantly astound me is
Simone Diaz who is a Venezuelan composer who
passed away a couple of years ago but his
Tonadas, Tonadas it's a song it means song essentially.
And his album Tonadas is such an amazing,
like encapsulation of our culture across like multiple regions.
And every time I listen to a song like the feeling that
comes over my body and just like the visuals
that run through my mind like constantly our source
of inspiration.
And I think when I think about my work
and when I think about not kind of being restricted
to a medium, I think about the feeling that
I get from those songs and that's what I try and evoke.


WHAT DOES GROWTH LOOK LIKE FOR YOU?

Nadia:
So at the moment I've been thinking a little
about growth in general and I think what
 I've realized is that I need to have growth in my life
as a whole and not just think solely about my practice
or think solely about my work and think about practice
more alongside of like, what do I, what do I do
when I first get up in the morning?
Like what am I eating and what am I consuming?
And then how does that translate into just overall
health and what am I reading and how do I make
time to like live my life in conjunction with
making work and how the two can be more balanced
and how the two can just fit in and out of each other.
So when I think about growth, I think about like
personal growth as an individual and how that
reflects back onto the work that I do in the studio
or the work that I do outside of the studio.


HOW DO YOU SURVIVE AS AN ARTIST?

Nadia:
I survive as an artist because there's a balance
between my output.
So in the past, before I was like solely
partitioning, well before I was just like
practicing as an artist, I had a design
background, so I was kind of working as a designer and
then I was making art alongside that.
And when that shifted, I think I was very aware of like
always having a sort of a balance between my
output so that I could pay rent or that I could buy
like materials.
And it is very hard 'cause that's constantly evolving.
But at the moment, that tends to
just be a combination between like having work
that has like commercial viability and then investing that
back into like my more experimental practice, yeah.