Eva Fernandez

Eva Fernández was born in Toronto, Canada and lives and works in Perth, WA. Fernandez completed a Doctor of Philosophy (Creative Arts) in 2023 and has been a practicing artist for over three decades, working across digital-based media, installation, video and other mediums. As an immigrant, Fernández’s practice is informed by dislocation from her culture and the negotiation of the spaces which she inhabits in context to their complex histories and cultural legacies. Coming from a diasporic post-Spanish Civil war immigrant family, starting often from her family history, Fernández explores how culture shapes individuals, specifically in relation to womanhood. Dislocation from her parental culture as a consequence of a traumatic event, informs her pluralistic identity in context to contemporary issues of global displacement and transgenerational trauma. Fernandez’s practice is also informed by feminist cultural studies theory, exploring the notion of womanhood in their varying contexts, from the Spanish Civil War period to colonisation in Australia to climate change and global warming. Fernández’s practice includes working within a photographic studio to create complex installations of symbolically laden objects, contemporary still-life’s and portraits. These images are composited and enhanced digitally in order to create images which are interventions that critique ideologies of the past and present. Drawing on fragmented histories, colonisation and imperialism as well as her own family narratives, her work embodies the traces and voices from the past that are blended and embedded in art and history of traumatic events, unearthing narratives which evoke repressed, shattered, emotional and forgotten histories.