Lizette Hernandez: Despierta

Desire leaves an imprint on the skin. It is cold and cool. Lizette Hernandez circumnavigates it: folds, curves, depths, secrets, dreams. Her ceramic vessels, wall bound works and vitrine-like forms explode in hues of spring green, brown and metallic, revealing surfaces that have been clawed into with fingernails and tools alike. The works read as luscious, fertile, sensual, flowing with an alchemical energy. They’re certainly alive, witnessing us.

All that touches Hernandez’s work seems to wake up and become animated. From the found gray rocks she places on their reflective black surfaces to the ceramic tears she adds to sculptures virginal in their nascent topology, these works become activated through their melancholia, through their feeling, through their life force. They remind us of our own longings, our own fears. They are borne of a medium that has been with us for millennia, like nymphs or benevolent duendes. They seem to suggest that, yes, there’s a reason ceramics have accompanied us for generations, acting like a collective memory, a repository, an imprint of our own bodies, own contours. They carry our fingerprints as signatures that we were here, and therein lies Hernandez’s mastery: she’s carved, molded, cast and cast-off her experiences, memories, and dreams.

The body of work called Despierta has a mystic pull, as if the works communicate on a level that precedes our own, speaking in a tongue of touch and gesture. It is a language we did not have to learn, but inherently know. Her vessels gently remind us that precious time is limited, and so as we seek connection with others, these works ask us to consider our connection to the flora and fauna, the spirit of the Earth. Like Hernandez’s vessels, we long for a return to land.