Natalia Nuñez Erhardt
Preserved Legacies

Natalia Núñez Erhardt is a Uruguayan visual artist and art teacher. A graduate of the IPA (Instituto de Profesores Artigas) and student at the Faculty of Arts in Montevideo, she began her career in the graphic arts and is currently dedicated to installation, exploring various materials. Her work focuses on the study of religion in society from a feminist approach.

Natalia came to ´ace after obtaining the FEFCA (Fondo de Estímulo a la Formación y Creación Artística) granted by the Uruguayan Ministry of Education and Culture. Here, she worked on Preserved Legacies, a project based on the collection of different religious objects used in a popular way, with which she made different local gastronomic preserves. With the idea of creating a collection and recipe book, Natalia set out to make a collection of religious preserves by cooking different objects such as virgins, Christs, saints, soaps and leaflets, generating a recipe for each one of them.

ARTIST STATEMENT

For the past seven years, my artwork has explored religion in its different forms, with a focus on female childhoods and the role of women within religious institutions. Much of my work is autobiographical and incorporates personal archives with a strong sense of denunciation. Currently, I investigate religions from a popular perspective, analyzing how people create their own saints and gods. This process has become a sociological study that, through art, seeks to reveal belief structures and their impact on society. I work with different materials and focus on installation as a means of expression.

So far I investigate from religious objects as amulets that are inherited and preserved in family circles and cultural customs. Amulets that at the same time adapt to new times and dissolve, adhere to the people who resort to them. In Latin America there is a great variety of different evangelical and protestant religions, as well as different branches of Catholicism that syncretize with the original traditions of our peoples. That is why it seems to me of great interest to collect these amulets that reflect these inherited, mutated and preserved religions, hand in hand with another great cultural tool such as local gastronomy, in different regions and Latin countries as an almost sociological study.