Since 2021, I have been exploring in a new body of work the impact that the social structures of my childhood in the 1950s had on me. I was born in Maracaibo, a city highly influenced by foreign oil companies. The mixture of these very different cultures—Venezuelan, Dutch, American, British, and German—placed me in a liminal space where I had to contend with various languages, discourses, foods, manners, and traditions daily.

This multiculturalism has emerged in my work since mid-2021, after a year of pandemic isolation that led to a more introspective phase in my career. This time has prompted me to use a new vocabulary of forms and color palettes. Additionally, the impossibility of using paint in my new studio due to city regulations forced me to look for a way to paint without paint, finding alternative means to rethink and recreate the visual grammar of my upbringing. I traded staples and staplers for thread and a sewing machine to convey the impact of bureaucracy on my work in a more intimate way.

In my sewn collage series “Sewings,” “Hilos,” “Azul Petróleo,” and “Empire,” I draw with threads expressing a sense of urgency by deliberately creating irregular seams over the colored cotton fabric and paper. These uneven seams and untrimmed threads hold the cutouts together—fragments of the modernity promised to me by a country in development financed by oil revenues—and become an essential component of the language of the work. 

My most recent series bridges past and present personal circumstances through new media, sustaining the rigorous exploration of color, form, and structure that has been central to my artistic practice since the beginning.

To visit my studio:
Please schedule an appointment by emailing vandalen@patriciavandalen.com

From the “Sewings M” series
2022
Sewn collage
Cotton fabric, polyester thread