Rowenna

Through my earth/body sculptures, I become one with the earth…I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body. This obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is really the reactivation of primeval beliefs…it is a manifestation of my thirst for being

Ana Mendieta

E. Carmen Ramos, our america exhibition (2014) at

Her body was the subject and object of the work. She used it to emphasise the societal conditions by which the female body is colonised as the object of male desire and ravaged under masculine aggression

Kaira Cabañas

“Ana Mendieta: Pain of Cuba, Body I Am” from Woman’s Art Journal 20 (1): pp 12–17, 1999.

I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (Nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source

Ana Mendieta

ANA

My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant from plant to galaxy. My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid. Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts

Nothing that she did ever surprised me. She was always very dramatic, even as a child — and liked to push the envelope, to give people a start, to shock them a little bit. It was who she was, and she enjoyed it very much. And she laughed about it sometimes when people got freaked out.

Raquelin Mendieta, Ana’s sister

Interview with New York Times,

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King