Camouflaged in the landscape

Ana Mendieta, Untitled, Siluetas Series, 1976I have written about Ana Mendieta on this blog twice before. In 2013 I gave an overview of how her work connects with landscape art, based on a major London retrospective of her work at the Hayward Gallery. Many of those pieces are back in London and on show in Tate Modern's new Mendieta exhibition. I highly recommend going, even if you're familiar with them already - I've been twice! She is a fascinating figure, a radical land artist but also someone you can discuss in terms of feminism, body art and performance, ancient cultures and symbols, ethnicity and identity, experimental film and site specific sculpture. Here though, I will add a few more words on my central theme, landscape, which was an active participant in the making of her art as you can see from the action of the waves in the Siluetas photographs above. One of the exhibition wall texts reads as follows: In the late 1970s Mendieta’s Silueta Series became further integrated…