Fields of Thread: Carmen Mardonez’s Chromatic Solace

Embroidery has long been bound up with expectations placed on women: hushed labour, domestic usefulness, patient decoration. For Chilean-born textile artist Carmen Mardonez, those expectations became the starting point for something altogether more expansive. Her solo exhibition Chromatic Solace, presented by Hannah Payne Art at TM Gallery in London (19 March – 5 June 2026), arrives in the wake of International Women’s Day and offers a vivid reminder of how textile practice can hold space for both resistance and care within its threads.

Carmen Mardonez, Texildermy III, 2023. Hand embroidered thread on discarded bedsheet. 

Now based in Oxford, Mardonez works across large-scale embroidery, sculptural textiles and installation. Her path to art has been shaped by an unusually interdisciplinary background. She studied history and later completed a master’s degree in community psychology in Chile, working for years in social policy and advocacy before returning to creative practice. Migration also played a role. Moving from Santiago to Los Angeles with a newborn child prompted an urgent period of making, during which embroidery evolved into the visual language through which she explored autonomy, motherhood and belonging...

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Image Credits:

Lead: Carmen Mardonez, Chromatic Solace, 2026. Hand embroidered thread on discarded bedsheet. 3 metres h x 6 metres w.

All further images as credited in captions and copyright of the artist.