Fragments in Blue
Fragments in Blue is a meditation on preservation, disappearance, and the tenderness of imperfect memory. Using cyanotype imagery embedded in wax, the works hold fragments of bodies, botanicals, landscapes, and domestic traces in a suspended blue atmosphere. The images appear both intimate and distant, as if seen through water, fog, or time. Flowers, faces, roots, shadows, and garments become evidence of touch and presence, while the wax surface transforms each piece into an object of care: sealed, softened, and partially obscured. Together, the works ask what remains when memory begins to dissolve, and what beauty exists in that fading.
As I excavated images of my past, I was struck by the dissolving nature of memory. These moments or fragments of time reshaped into a new narrative. The actual space occupied dissolving away. This is the nature of memory. The truth of the moment is often lost and what emerges feels hazier and emotionally poignant, in this way, the details don’t matter. Many things can call forth to us this feeling of memory; a flower, a face, an article of clothing, a photo. As I worked, I was struck by the many seasons of my life, versions of myself currently obscured by the present. Young motherhood, mature motherhood, womanhood, family and ancestry are key themes that emerged. Exploring what it means to be connected to something that feels so immediate, loving something so fiercely while sensing the fleeting nature of its impermanence. All the while being shaped by our personal narratives that are merely fragments of time pieces together into a constantly changing narrative of self and life.
Cyano printing helped me capture images that felt lost and long forgotten, encaustic wax provided an obscured, hazy quality blurring the lines of reality. The gold line that appears and reappears in each painting represents the repairing that is offered as we review these fragments of time. Nostalgia is this very experience, memory coming to us in fragments like the images of these paintings, murky, drowned, obscured and reimagined.
Artist Bio
Ana Carolina Hurant Carolina Hurant creates mixed-media works that feel like fragments recovered from memory. Using cyanotype, encaustic wax, photography, and botanicals, she builds luminous blue surfaces where faces, flowers, landscapes, and traces of the body emerge and disappear. Her work is concerned with preservation, tenderness, absence, and the quiet transformation of personal imagery into relic-like objects. Through wax and light, she creates an archive of what remains. Ana Carolina resides in Chapel Hill with her husband and 3 boys ages 13, 8 and 6.