FEBRUARY 26 - MARCH 21
Renegade Women
Renegade Women is a body of work developed through my independent postdoctoral research and emerges from a sustained engagement with feminist practice, archival inquiry, memory, and material intervention. Extending my decade-long series Uno Cuantos Piquetitos (2015–2025), in which stitch first became a critical tool for interrupting photographic surfaces, this project moves from fragmentary gestures toward a more expansive engagement with image, language, and inherited memory.
The works are built from found portrait photographs sourced in Spain and dating primarily from the early twentieth century, a moment of profound transition in women’s lives. Produced in pre–Spanish Civil War Spain, they capture women on the threshold of modernity, when social and political visibility was increasing and claims to autonomy were beginning to surface, culminating in women’s suffrage in 1931 during the Second Spanish Republic. Yet these images also foreshadow the violent reversal to come: the recontainment of women’s freedoms through Catholic morality, domestic ideology, and the disciplining language of the state.
Eva Fernandez, What kind of example are you giving those children? - ¿Qué ejemplo estás dando a esas criaturas?, Giclée Fine Art Print on Hahnemühle photo rag, glass beads, silk thread and gold metallic thread, 60x53cm
Many of the photographs arrive without names, provenance, or familial context. Circulating as orphaned objects, purchased from antique dealers rather than safeguarded in family collections, they raise unsettling questions about loss and historical rupture: why were these intimate records not cherished and kept? What conditions of displacement, fear, violence, or silence rendered them surplus to memory? While definitive answers remain unknowable, the absence of identity becomes evidence in itself, pointing to systemic erasure rather than individual forgetting.
Alongside these anonymous images, I include photographs from my own family archive, intentionally left unidentified. This refusal resists privileging familial knowledge over other erased histories and acknowledges the limits of recovery within archives shaped by violence, silence, and displacement. My mother, born in Madrid during the Civil War and raised under Francoist rule, was among the women whose lives were disciplined through shame, surveillance, and moral correction, pressures that compelled her to leave Spain as a young adult.
Eva Fernandez, Debauchery and more debauchery - Libertinaje y más libertinaje, Giclée Fine Art Print on Hahnemühle photo rag, glass beads, silk thread and gold metallic thread, 60x53cm
The embroidered text is drawn from letters written to my mother by her parents after her migration to Canada in 1962. Discovered and translated only after her death in 2021, this correspondence spans decades and reveals how authoritarian values persisted within intimate family relations long after dictatorship’s formal end, operating through obligation, judgement, and emotional coercion. By re-inscribing these phrases onto archival portraits through cross-stitch, beading, and gilding, Renegade Women transforms language of shame into a feminist counter-archive, one that collapses the boundary between the familial and the political, and insists on the dignity, complexity, and endurance of women whose lives were made precarious within both history and memory.
Dr Eva Fernandez, 2026
Adjunct Fellow - School of Arts and Humanities – Edith Cowan University
