Commonwealth and Council presents quiero continuar contigo desde aquí/to go on from here with you by Patricia Fernández, her first solo exhibition in Mexico City. Through her painting, carved wood sculpture, and ceramic practices, Fernández creates material contexts and records for encounters and relationships—among biological and chosen families—honoring the human bonds that sustain us through passing on of family legacies, acts of generosity, and intimate conversation. For this exhibition, Fernández has created a new body of work consisting of paintings and sculptures that take on fractals, women’s bodies, and clocks as motifs, touching on feminist, matriarchal value systems and indigenous knowledge repudiating Western capitalist logic. The works speak to the artist’s ruminations on women’s gift-giving economies, forms of measure, and timekeeping; the passing of time through birth and growth, as well as aging and decay of, our own bodies and those of our loved ones.

Fernández’s work is perhaps best represented by Box (a proposition for ten years), a time-based sculpture that marks and traces a relationship. Born in Burgos, Spain, the artist’s grandfather was a woodworker, and she grew up watching him carve intricate geometric patterns on furniture, clocks, and architectural details. She remembered how he often made and gave boxes, receptacles for memory, as gifts. Taking on her own family legacy, Fernández started the Box series in 2012. Starting with a carved, handmade box by the artist, the work entails a decade-long commitment between the artist and the interlocutor. Fernández adds to the box as the relationship develops and evolves, with letters, drawings, and at times sculptural works that are larger than the physical box itself.

Continuing her exploration of intergenerational dialogues, care, and inheritances, recent work has been inspired by the artist’s own experience of giving birth and motherhood. Where in the past, Fernández translated her grandfather’s geometric sketches and notes for future carvings into her own paintings; since her daughter’s birth in 2021, she has been painting spiral compositions based on cervical dilation charts, medical diagrams and sketches from her postpartum notebooks. For the works in quiero continuar contigo desde aquí/to go on from here with you, the artist delves into her interest in fractals, inspired by the Seneca writer Barbara Alice Mann’s essay “The Fractal Binaries of the Gift.”

Mann proffers Native American math, which takes two as a base number in contrast to the Western base number of one, as a framework to consider alternative mathematical, and thus economic, systems of value and exchange. In the binary logic of Native American math, complementary components (east/west; split sky north/south) must come together to form a whole One. Every One can only be made of “two halves together.” The ubiquitous “X” motif in Native American design illustrates this way of thinking where the four in-between areas matter more than the lines or boundaries. Mann elaborates on how the “X” symbol becomes a fractal, ever-expanding. She ties this idea to the self-replicating nature of the gift economy, where acts of generosity beget future gestures of kindness. It is perhaps an antidote to the quid pro quo transactional logic of capitalism and linear math.

Fernández draws on such matriarchal wisdom to imagine a space for human connection and exchange. The title of the show comes from a love poem by the late queer feminist poet Adrienne Rich, whose own magnanimous act in 1974 of receiving the National Book Award with Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, begot future courageous acts of sharing and rejecting winner-take-all ideology. A circular walnut table sculpture features repeated X shaped carvings that were a signature of her grandfather, who thought of them as stars. For Fernández, it long symbolized a timekeeping unit, as she observed how it took her grandfather five minutes to carve one X. The motif takes on a new layer of meaning, of the complementary in betweens. Two ceramic cups shaped like breasts rest on the table, inviting us to sit down, share a drink, and consider the cords of love and kindness that tie us.