ANA MENDIETA: TRACES

I went to see Ana Mendieta's first UK retrospective Traces at the Hayward Gallery and was really taken by how powerful the work was. My understanding of this kind of very raw, confrontational and at times disturbing work is partially limited as I am part of a very different generation of feminist artistic expression and am aware that a lot of her explorations as a young artist were relevant to her location and the time in which she was working. However, this Cuban American artist and sculptor had big things to say throughout her varied life and now posthumously, once again had a voice.

I thought of all the works displayed in this retrospective, her reaction and subsequent recreation of the rape and murder of a student at the University of Iowa was particularly resonant. Friends and classmates were invited to enter her apartment (finding the door ajar) and walked in to find the distressing scene of a murdered Mendieta tied up and covered in blood.

Throughout her works she repeats themes of life and death, feminism, belonging and identity. Her body-earth work is particularly beautiful. It reminded me of a mixture between Antony Gormley's recurring motif of the human form and Andy Goldsworthy's often delicate manipulation of elements of the natural world. However, uniquely Mendieta's work has its own theatrical, often eery, film-like quality.

It's often hard to separate an artist's life and their work, but even harder with an artist such as Mendieta, who's legacy has been somewhat overshadowed by her tragic and premature death. In 1985 she fell 34 floors from her New York apartment block at the young age of 36, inciting speculation of murder by her fellow artist and husband of eight months Carl Andre. This being said (and given I was largely unfamiliar with the artist's work) I really wanted to experience Traces as neutrally as possible, without consideration of the artist's scandalized baggage and entirely in it's own right- as I felt it should be viewed.

Through fire, mud, blood and water I stepped in and back out of the ballsy world of this intriguing artist, finding that sometimes I was able to connect to her ideas and sometimes I was not; it felt like a journey and I think that is exactly what she would have intended.