Debra Fernandez is a choreographer, dance educator, and mixed media collage artist living and working out of Saratoga Springs, New York and St. Pete, Florida.
My collage work grows directly out of my longtime experience as a dancer and choreographer. The collage process—cutting, pasting, moving shapes and images in relation to the frame of the page and in relation to one another—involves the same sense of play, the same ways of dealing with positive and negative space, as creating a dance. My own somatic instincts, including energy, connection, and flow, guide my art-making; I impose no preplanned design and allow each collage to emerge in its own time.
I begin by cutting or tearing the paper, guided by intuitive movement in the moment, much like improvisational dance. I then lay out some of the shapes on a blank piece of paper and, in choreographic fashion, begin to move them around, assembling and reassembling. I also look for scraps and pieces of paper on my table or floor, finding places to layer them in, maintaining an element of chance and randomness that steers me away from the analytical part of the brain.
This is a daily practice, one that feels akin to a moving meditation. Sometimes it aligns with something more than just an expression of the moment and transcends into an image that speaks both to me and to viewers on a deeper level—evoking different interpretations, meanings, and emotional responses. For me, these pieces feel like corporeal representations of an energy or feeling state that is within me, waiting to take shape or be given a voice.
Process
The NO/YES Manifesto
(adapted from Yvonne Ranier’s 1964 No Manifesto)
NO to perfection/YES to randomness, accidents, and surprise
NO to exact symmetry/YES to “Alignment is everywhere”
NO to the tyranny of planning/YES to spontaneous design
NO to forcing/YES to emergence
NO to wastefulness/YES to scraps and leftovers
NO to impatience/YES to instant revelations
NO to hiding flaws/YES to rough edges and jagged cuts
NO to precision/YES to tearing, ripping, cutting and pasting
NO to exact repetition/YES to endless replication
NO to the clock/YES to five days or five minutes
NO to the finest of the fine/YES to Wabi Sabi.