"Who is Afraid of Ana Mendieta?" - Femina 2

For my second piece in the series Femina series I decided to finally tackle a long-held wish to interpret one of Ana Mendieta’s drawings. I have been fascinated by her art for many years, and her uprootedness from Cuba, her ways of expressing and exploring her feminine experience made her a natural inspiration.

Screenshot of https://www.lempertz.com/de/kataloge/kuenstlerverzeichnis/detail/mendieta-ana.html, taken on March 4, 2026

I traced one of her linear goddesses and altered it by changing the width of the lines and slightly freeing the ‘swing’ of their movement. I also increased the size of what I would call the ‘head’ of the figure, because to me that seemed quite a bit too small in the original, shifting too much importance to the lower body half. I had the feeling this woman needs more brains in relation to the womb. Yet her influence, the presence of the original is still clearly there, I intentionally did not want to divert radically from the inspirational piece.

(For a brief video on Ana Mendieta’s art please take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6HD4p2E3GA)

Many years ago I made many quilts (a majority of my ‘Play of Lines’ series, for example) with a paper-templates technique that I had perfected and been very familiar with. In a way, this piece would fit very well into that series, as it consists of linear shapes. But the temporal distance to that series – which I never believed or declared to be finished – has, unfortunately, also led to losing touch with the technique. I’d forgotten some steps in the procedure, which used to make working the technique reliable and well sorted out, and leaving them out made the process a bit more bumpy (or should I say bulky?) than I had imagined.

Numbering the templates is only one of the steps in construction. At least that necessary step I had not forgotten...

I pushed through, re-fell in love with that technique and think I should make more quilts in that way, but for that certainly need to remind myself of those steps that made life easier.

For this piece I wanted to stay very frugal in my choice of fabrics. I picked two different pieces of snow-dyed fabric, dyed in the same instance, and therefore rather similar to each other in the marking, they make up the background.

Cutting the pieces from the background fabric includes being careful about keeping it all in order, otherwise the overall image is going to look rather disparate.

The figure is cut from a piece of Bali cotton, a lush red that had demanded to become mine a while ago when I had long since stopped buying Bali prints.

My lack of familiarity with my old technique showed itself in the fact that some of the curves were cut rather sharply and turned out difficult to sew.

This could have been changed through a different size of the entire piece – prohibited by the given size limitations – or by adding more seam lines, which would have made it easier to sew but most likely would have broken up the clarity of the design. In the end, I think it is good as it is, additional seams might have been a distraction.

During sewing I kept being reminded about ancient Cretan motifs and thus decided to add Cretan stitches as hand quilting elements.

Leaving thread hanging before and after the stitches is an additional design element - and saves time .

(It may be that hand embroidery for quilting is the one unifying element on my pieces of this series? A bit of a scary thought, as the idea that I have for the next one right now does not seem to lend itself to hand embroidery, but that need not be of any concern right now.)

Here is a photo of the piece as is right now, prior to finishing the edges.

And below will appear a photo of the finished piece when life situation gives me a cutting mat worth speaking of to finish facing and sleeve etc.