Camille Hernandez has the audacity of women planting orchards to feed future generations.
Artist Statement
Oppression works at the pace of capitalism, which works at the pace of social media, which operates at a pace unsustainable to humanity. Dignity dies at this pace. Camille’s poetry interrupts oppression’s velocity by recreating narratives dignifying Black women, Filipino women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled women, medically marginalized women, gender-expansive women, and mothering women. These marginalized women intersect within her. Camille’s writing invites readers to explore the complex care-based leadership of our grandmothers, mothers, and aunties as blueprints for survival. Every poem explores marginalized women’s survival as a map through oppression’s thicket. What remains is a body of work amplifying our survival, intuition, interconnection, and defiant joy.
Camille’s work explores the fluidity of intimacy in marginalized women’s relationships. It invites readers to reflect on their allegiance to oppressing and exploiting marginalized women. If language is the poet’s jungle, then dignity is Camille’s machete. I craft poetry into vibrant portraits of marginalized women. With a writing notebook in hand, I contemplate how language dictates cultural, social, economic, and political realities. Camille’s pen hacks away withering flora, uncovering nutrient-rich life beneath rotting roots. Camille’s writing serves meals from those nutrients, proclaiming dignity through pairing vibrant textures, intricate patterns, and sensory experiences. Portrait and quilting artists like Kehinde Wiley, Bisa Butler, and Precious D Lovell inspire her creative expression. Poets Elizabeth Acevedo, Jericho Brown, and Ariana Brown push Camille to carve new narrative trails that explore the hushed intimacies lost in suppressed histories.
What People Are Saying
