At the heart of Chromatic Solace is the artist’s understanding of making as a place of refuge — a practice rooted in feelings of safety, happiness, and emotional grounding. For Mardonez, colour becomes a form of solace: a space that feels protective and intimate, akin to home.
Hannah Payne Art announces Chromatic Solace, a solo exhibition by Chilean textile artist Carmen Mardonez, at TM Gallery, London.
Working across large-scale embroidered works, sculptural textiles and installations, Mardonez reimagines embroidery as a contemporary visual language shaped by colour, gesture and material presence. Now based in Oxford, UK, the artist relocated in 2023 after living and working in Los Angeles from 2017.
At the heart of Chromatic Solace is the artist’s understanding of making as a place of refuge — a practice rooted in feelings of safety, happiness, and emotional grounding. For Mardonez, colour becomes a form of solace: a space that feels protective and intimate, akin to home. Her works function almost as a security blanket, holding warmth, memory, and care, while fostering a sense of connection between maker, material, and viewer.
The exhibition presents a new large-scale embroidered installation measuring over five metres width, shown publicly for the first time, alongside works from the artist’s ongoing Textildermy series and a sculptural wall-hung textile piece. Together, these works create an immersive environment that invites close, bodily engagement, balancing scale with tenderness and tactility.
Created in response to the saturated light of Los Angeles, the works are infused with vivid pinks, purples, and greens that echo sunsets, beaches, and neon-lit cityscapes. These chromatic references sit alongside Mardonez’s long-standing fascination with the Northern Lights, whose shifting colours and atmospheric movement inform the rhythm and flow of her stitched surfaces.
All of the works presented in Chromatic Solace are created using discarded bed sheets as the canvas for Mardonez’s freehand embroidery. The artist works with repurposed textiles — often donated by friends and members of the local community — transforming materials such as worn bedding, waste food sacks, and other domestic fabrics into expansive, sculptural compositions. This circulation of materials, which began during the pandemic as a gesture of community care, has become central to her practice.
Working freehand and intuitively, Mardonez builds each composition through accumulations of thread. Painterly gestures emerge through repeated stitches, layering colour and texture into expansive, enveloping fields. Using discarded domestic textiles such as bedsheets and clothing, her practice is deeply relational — shaped by the generosity of those who donate materials, and by the personal histories carried within the fabrics themselves. In this way, the works hold quiet traces of shared lives, care, and labour, while asserting embroidery as a site of autonomy, intimacy, and creative freedom.
The exhibition Chromatic Solace takes place ahead of Mardonez’s forthcoming solo exhibition in Philadelphia (September 2027), following her residency at Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens (Philadelphia Mosaic Museum), supported by a 2025 Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Grant.
The works at TM Gallery will be expertly lit using TM Lighting’s high-CRI lighting, bringing the depth, colour and texture of the embroidered surfaces vividly to life.
Private View: Thursday 19 March 6 - 8 pm. Please RSVP
Artist Talk: 29 April
Carmen Mardonez in Conversation with TF Chan, Director of COLLECT, at TM Gallery 6.30 – 8.30 pm. To register interest to attend, please email info@hannahpayneart.co.uk
