Ana Mendieta

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E., it buried the affluent city of Pompeii in around 20 feet of volcanic pumice and ash. It would have only taken about a day, but it wasn’t until 1748 that scholarly collectors unearthed the first human remains. Then, a century later, the famous vacant cavities where discovered—the spaces containing the last moments of local residents’ lives as they became eternally fixed in time and space, some 2,000 years ago. As if through a kind of volcanic lost-wax process, archaeologists eventually cast plaster forms from the hollows left by the long vanished bodies. The emotional impact of these figures is visceral.

In 1983, upon receipt of the Rome Prize, Cuban artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) spent a year in Italy at the American Academy in Rome. She split her time between Rome and New York until her untimely death in September 1985, when she fell 33 stories from a Greenwich Village apartment window. (Her husband, the artist Carl Andre, was charged with her murder but subsequently acquitted.) Mendieta’s time in Rome marked a major new focus on her work, pivoting from photography as a primary medium to sculpture, and in her studio there, she began to develop her seminal Silueta series. Surrounded by ancient Roman history, it’s not difficult to imagine the ways that time, form, presence, and antiquity informed a new way of looking at not only materials in a conceptual sense but at the earth as a whole.

“My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy,” Mendieta is quoted in Where Is Ana Mendieta? (Duke University Press, 1999). “My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid. Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts that animate the world.” Mendieta’s Silueta series evolved through a succession of impressions of the human body in water, mud, rock, and forests. These sometimes consisted of outlines incised or outlined onto surfaces, such as a gunpowder tribute on a fallen tree, which exists eternally half-ablaze in a photograph. Others are impressed directly into the earth, as if a person had been lying prone and rapt for millennia, as the desert or stone formed around her.

In what she described as “earth-body” works, Mendieta explored vital relationships between humans and nature, experience and temporality, and place and identity. She often turned the lens on herself, building compositions that plumb the tensions between beauty, ruggedness, vulnerability, and strength. Her practice can easily be viewed through the lens of ecofeminism, a movement that emerged around the same time Mendieta was working, but it is also profoundly personal. Imágen de Yágul, for example, features the artist coated from head to toe with airy white flowers, like baby’s breath, taken at a Zapotec archeological site called Yágul in Oaxaca, Mexico. Here, caves and shelters were occupied by inhabitants as far back as 500 B.C.E., and the ruins of monumental stone structures primarily from the 13th to 16th centuries C.E. dominate the landscape.

Mendieta drew on her fascination with archaeology to create multimedia works that delved into the relationship between humans and the land. “My work is basically in the tradition of a Neolithic art,” she said in 1984. “I’m not interested in the formal qualities of my materials, but their emotional and sensual ones.” Her material choices were deceptively simple: feathers, flowers, dirt, fire. She approached them with a kind of childlike fascination: pasting feathers onto her nude body or piling up wads of grass or plants on her skin. Later, she shifted away from portrayals of her own body in the Silueta series, swapping in outlines and imprints of the body with a variety of elemental mediums.

Mendieta was interested in the paradoxical nature of absence, in which a void suggests emptiness just as much as it is itself a presence. The artist often worked with the earth, creating reliefs of figures redolent of cave paintings or Stone Age carvings, and she “traced their origins to her Cuban childhood, recalling crawling across sandy beaches as a baby, an early bodily encounter with the earth,” writers Dr. Gillian Sneed for Smarthistory. In the same way that tides rise and fall, erasing marks in the sand, Mendieta’s work is ephemeral. A gunpowder outline explodes violently in a matter of seconds, and then it is extinguished. The artist’s photographs and Super 8mm documentation captured fleetingness, for posterity, saving impressions of things that would eventually vanish.

Ana Mendieta runs through January 17 at Tate Modern, London. ✧

Some excerpts above originally appeared in an article by the author published on Colossal.

Header: Untitled: Silueta Series, 1977. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, 2026. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery and Alison Jacques, London.

All images courtesy of Tate, shared with permission.