My women are all of us… inevitably broken, broken, dismantled, recomposed, reinvented, graceful and with wings, many wings. Some are powerful, clear, strong and joyful. Others, a little sad and tired… they give their all. And in this giving their all, they meet and meet again with others like them and, hopeful, they feel less lonely, accompanied and understood. Without even noticing it, they become ONE.

They rebuild themselves with pieces of others, with other people’s sorrows and joys, with borrowed affection, with shared forms and gestures… mainly, with not knowing they are alone. This is how my blurred, deconstructed and reconstructed women are rearranged with a bit of each other, forming boundless and intertwined souls that together can live everything.

The UNA process was very intense and the message is very profound. It was resolving through drawing and emotions, the sense of transcendence, which finally has to do with deep bonds, relationships or encounters that touch my soul so much that they are capable of transforming me, even a little bit, into the other person, into that other woman who, by definition, is located in the permanent or circumstantial place of the companion without judgment, of a complementary and kind soul that contains me, helps me to broaden my look and fix it on the horizon.

UNA is an intimate feminine look, where I honour women and above all the mother as the supreme woman, even in her absence, because it is impossible to be absent if the bond was or is intimate, profound from love and infinite surrender.

My work speaks about what I want to silence

I inherited my love for the visual arts from my mother, Mariana Haddad Bon, visual artist and academic at the University of Chile, who had the generosity to allow me to live among pencils, watercolours, oil paintings, workshops, classrooms and walks in the open air with a lectern on my back.

Sometimes I feel like I was born with a pencil in my hand, sometimes for it to write, but most of the time for it to make strokes. Without a doubt, it is the way I express myself most honestly and spontaneously, leaving no room for control… in drawing I am unfiltered.

Everything that emerges from my hands in the gesture of catching a pencil, corresponds to my unconscious expressing itself freely. Somehow, my drawing always speaks what I want to keep silent…

María Victoria Feres Haddad