Memoria Bordada | Embroidered Memory
Daniela García Hamilton on holding her family close through craft and color.
Let’s start with the title Amanecer / Atardecer (Sunrise / Sunset). It’s beautiful and poetic, but also very grounded in everyday life. What does that title mean to you, and how does it reflect this body of work?
The title, Amanecer / Atardecer means the passing of time to me. In a lot of the works, you see different gradients shown through windows, or just as a background, or as part of the space the figures inhabit. A lot of the sunsets and sunrises, for me, represent the different timelines of the younger generation of kids intermingling with experiences of my parents and my grandparents, who were the first immigrants. So with a lot of the younger kids, you'll see gradients that represent sun rising like the beginning of something, and then the older ones, it'll be like sunsets, like twilight time. It's literally passing time from day to night to the next generation.
Gosh, that's beautiful. The series feels like it's always moving, whether it's the passing of time, the crossing of borders or the trading of stories between generations. Do you see your work living in that space between remembering where you come from and also becoming who you're meant to be?
Yes, definitely. A lot of the scenes are fabricated, so the references all come from photos I've taken myself. But a lot of the times, like what's going on in the pieces, or the experiences that I'm describing are personal experiences, but the ones acting them out tend to be kids from my family, so they're never directly tied to things that the kids have done. It's more things that I remember and then I place them in that space.
It’s like you're building your own archive of family history and telling a story, which I think is beautiful. I think that's such an incredible thing to have those pieces and be able to give them to your family members. There’s an added value because it's something that you made with love and care.
Yeah, it makes it feel more like a scene that's actively happening, versus a documentation of something in the past.
You use both embroidery and oil paint, which are two incredibly different materials, but they blend so seamlessly. How do you decide when you're going to paint and when you're going to stitch?
The embroidery comes first. I think of a lot of the works as like collages. I don't know what the final work is going to look like in the beginning. I tend to add a lot of elements as I'm working through it, but usually the base that I have is the figure, and then a rough idea for the environment. I do the embroidery on just the figures, primarily because I'm trying to bring a sense of vibrancy to them. It usually ends up being that I'll do a lot of the environments, like an oil at the end, after I've finished the embroidery and I've stretched the piece.
Using the embroidery adds texture to the figures, like an almost three dimensional kind of texture where they come to life. Have you ever had a moment where you wish that you had used embroidery in a certain section, or vice versa?
Not yet. I tend to get most of those bigger decisions out of the way in the beginning. The thing that I do decide at the moment is what level I'll use the embroidery to because I’ve had a couple pieces where articles of clothing were fully rendered with the embroidery, and then the rest was still embroidery string, but it was just outlines. So I'll make decisions like that as I'm working with the string, but whether something will have it or not is determined before I start on the piece. Once I stretch the piece, there's no way to go back in and include it, because I also have to seal the surface. Otherwise, I noticed while I worked on the string that the canvas when stretched with the string fluctuates with humidity, so the stretch becomes loose, and like canvas starts to sag. I realized that after I finished the string, I had to put some type of sealant on it to make it stiff.
When you're starting a piece and you do the embroidery first, do you do it off the frame and then stretch?
Yeah. I use raw canvas cut from a roll. And I use a quilting table to kind of have the canvas propped on something. And then I just work that way with both of my hands. One passes it under, while the other goes on top, until you get to the final image.
The colors are so vibrant and rich. They make the work feel really emotional. Their vibrancy makes the figures and colors feel like they are carrying memory. Are there certain colors that mean something personal or cultural for you? Do you pick specific colors for specific things?
The way I organize it is to separate all the colors by warm and cool temperature way that I naturally see things is by hue or color variety versus value, which is light and dark. So I'm not very good at distinguishing lights and darks within one color, but I am really good at distinguishing color temperature shifts. I actually struggled with that when I was in art school, because when I was there they wanted you to paint with a lot of neutrals and focused on the value. I would use things like purple as a shadow, because to me, that just communicated that something was darker, versus making it dark brown. I couldn't figure out how to do it. So that's where the string comes in. I buy large variety packs with random colors in it, and then I separate them by temperature. From there, in the moment, I'll pick which one I think will look better in certain areas. For my shadows, they'll usually be things like purple, blues, greens, like anything that I consider to be like a cooler tone color, and then anything in the light will be like warmer colors.
Embroidery is such a personal cultural practice, especially in Mexican families. Do you feel like using that material and practicing embroidery connects you to your own family history or even a larger historical tradition.
For sure. I ended up getting into embroidery through my grandparents. I found out after my grandpa had passed away that they both worked in textiles. I spent more time with my grandma just to hear more about my grandpa's life, because I realized I didn't know as much as I thought I did. Some of the activities we did when we were bonding is she taught me how to do cross stitch, and I was really bad at it. Cross stitch is super rigid and there's a very specific technical aspect for the way you're supposed to do it. If you don't do it correctly, it’s technically wrong. I learned how to do the basics of it when I was working with my grandma, and it brought me to the idea of wanting to try making a piece of my grandpa out of string as a gift to my grandma. That's what got me into embroidery. The more I did it, it made me reflect on how this was a skill that my mom purposefully didn't teach us [my and my two sisters], because she always saw it as very much a homemaker skill. She was taught how to do it forcefully. It was one of the few activities they could do, and she didn't want to do that with us. So it reminds me how in Mexico, specifically embroidering those decorative things with the string is something that is exclusively for little girls, and they don't get to explore other things. So doing it as an adult felt different, because it's a choice now to try to do something with this, and it felt empowering.
I can absolutely see how that would be empowering. It's not something that was forced on you because of your gender, or a societal expectation that that's what you're supposed to learn to do. It reminds me of middle school, home economics and shop classes, where students had to take a class according to their gender. Then they started opening them up so you could decide what you wanted to do. Boys actually wanted to do home economics and girls wanted to do computer science, which there's freedom in that. It’s great that you got to learn embroidery as an adult. It’s a way to bond with your family history.
Your grandparents were in textiles, and your grandfather was a storyteller. How did his stories shape how you see your art today, not just as visual, but as something that speaks?
He was very much in the literal sense, a storyteller. When we were kids, the way that my grandpa used to entertain us was by making up stories like about himself that as kids, we thought were true. He was so compelling in the way that he told his stories, that you just believed them. I remember vividly, when he stayed with us, there was a neighbor that lived not too far off and my grandpa was really close friends with him. We loved my grandpa, so we used to follow him when he would go to the neighbor's house. I think he got annoyed with us following him, so he made up this elaborate ghost story about how when he walks over to the friend's house there's a ghost that follows him, and he would hear the clanking of his shoes and maybe a ghost horse behind him. The way that he told it was so impactful that I remember it to this day. It scared us to the point where we never followed him again to the neighbor's house. He had a way about him where he would either make up stories, or he would retell things about his own life that it felt like you were reading a novel because of the way that he would say it. The way that I would be able to picture things when he would retell these stories, is what got me into creating narrative works instead of still lives or representational pieces. I wanted to create things that had some type of story that people could connect to in a way. And it came from him.
I can see that because it's like each piece is a little vignette of an event in your life. It’s like a little story within a larger narrative of your history. Even though he maybe wouldn't have called himself an artist, would you consider your grandfather the first artist in your family?
Yeah. I feel like if my grandpa had a different life without the difficulties of being an immigrant, where he was just trying to survive, he would have been a really good writer.
In some of the pieces in this series, your grandfather and your nephew appear together. What made you want to put them together in the same space, even though they’d never met?
My grandpa was, as you can imagine, a pillar in my family. He was a very central figure to everybody. When he passed away, it was pretty obvious how much he left behind. When my nephew Zeke started walking , he began developing mannerisms like my grandpa. He had characteristics from the way he walked to the way he talked, and the way he expressed himself, that were very similar to my grandpa. It felt like mannerisms were genetic. How was he able to walk the same way my grandpa walked? He also has a similar expression he makes when he is frustrated, but he's a little boy. He's only three, so he's never seen videos or images of my grandpa, but yet he embodies a lot of characteristics of his. So that's why you see them in the same space, to tell that story where some of these things are passed on through time, through family. I have a piece where it's the little boy just walking through and when I took that image specifically and saw it, I was like, that's my grandpa. That's why I depicted him in my grandpa's courtyard with all the plants around him. To show them existing in the same plane.
That's so fascinating. It’s amazing when you can see an elder who has passed in the younger generations, even though they never crossed paths.
You’re a first-gen Mexican-American, which comes with a lot of beautiful contradictions. Do you see your art as a way to make sense of living between cultures, between past and future, Mexico and the U.S.?
Definitely. I feel like I’ve always struggled with the feeling of assimilation, where it's almost like a guilty feeling. Like the more you feel like you belong, the more it feels like it pulls you farther away from your roots. So I feel like the work definitely speaks to that. It's a unique experience.
My family's Puerto Rican and Dominican and I remember becoming very assimilated without even noticing it. Then when I went to college, I started learning about Puerto Rican history through classes. I remember realizing I didn't even know my own history. I felt like I was so far removed from that, from that culture,
I had a slightly different experience where I was overly involved in the bubble of the culture. I spent a lot of time visiting where my roots came from and where my dad's family was from in Mexico. I had a whole life over there. I would go multiple times a year, and see friends and family. I had a true connection, that when I was there I felt like I belonged. It wasn't until I started college that I realized how little I actually knew about American culture. Even though I'd lived here my whole life and had friends, I didn't know the things that they talked about. In college, I ended up with my first group of white friends. They would make references to movies, music and other things that were very common knowledge that I just didn't know.
You’ve talked about the “inevitability of assimilation.” How do you hold that tension, what gets lost and what gets protected, when you’re making this work?
I feel like a lot of the colors that I choose specifically for the background, I'm intentionally picking colors that are from the houses that I remember I lived in when I was in Mexico. There's one piece that has a bright pink wall, and that was the color of my aunt's house for years, so I would associate that color a lot with it. And then the one with my grandpa has a bright greenish teal color, that was the color of the house that he had when I was around nine. I try to do things like that where the environments will call back to the roots, but then the figures themselves will hold elements that are much more assimilated. My cousins will be wearing whatever trendy outfit they wear as teenagers living here versus what they would wear in Mexico. It's always a conversation where it's the environment itself that speaks back to the roots and the things that I remember and try to hold on to. Then the figures are more so being pulled towards assimilation and trying to conform.
A lot of first-gen folks grow up as translators, between languages, generations, even emotions. Do you feel like your art is translating something? And if so, who are you translating for?
I think I'm translating for more than one group. In a way, I'm translating the culture to the American audience. I try to keep my work accessible, where anybody, not just Mexican Americans, feel an element of the work that connects to them in some aspect. I'm also speaking to my family. I try to create images where they have little nudges of events or celebrations, or just little clues that when my parents see the work, even if they don't know what it's about, they can point things out and say, “Oh, I know this.” I'm translating for both sides.
When you’re stitching hands and faces, your family’s stories, into these pieces. Do you feel like you’re stitching parts of yourself together too?
Definitely.I feel like the work is usually about me in a sense, even though I don't paint self portraits or anything like that. I'm usually constructing something that's from my own experience or different aspects that I've experienced into one cohesive area.
How has making the work changed the way that you understand your own identity?
It kind of made me realize how much my identity really connects to, not just my surroundings, but to my family. Most of the things that I tell in the work, they're never experiences that I had by myself. It's always something that happened with multiple people. Having them there is what makes it an impactful moment.
How long does a piece typically take when you're deep into making a piece? What's your rhythm like? And does it feel like ritual or like memory work?
I started doing embroidery about two years ago. When I first started, it took forever. I think it would take me a few months to do a small piece. And now the larger piece for example, the three panel embroidery that’s about 60” wide, I finished that in the course of a month. I've gotten much faster at it, but it's because, like, I've kind of figured out the rhythm of how to switch between the colors, where it's become much quicker. Before, that's what would take a really long time, deciding where to put everything. When I'm working with the string, once I make the stitch, I can't remove it anymore because the string is a mess of crossing in the back, so I can't just cut it out. It can take a couple weeks to a few months to finish a piece. When I'm sitting there working with the piece, it definitely does feel a little ritualistic. I almost go into a trance when I'm really working on it.
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