Inés Hernández
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Inés Hernández is an interdisciplinary artist and educator born and based in New York City. She made her first piece of jewelry at 26, staying up late one night with borrowed pliers and supplies from the diamond district. Since then she has moved through sculpture, collage, metalwork, cyanotype and printmaking, mixing materials and processes freely. She calls the results "artifacts from higher worlds," borrowing the term from Rudolf Steiner. She also teaches creative workshops in New York.
Q: You're an artist, an educator, and a self-described fervent lover of raw honey. Tell us about yourself. How did this practice begin?
A: I love raw honey, and I love the words together. The raw, the real. The honey, the sweetness. That conveys so much of what I feel about pretty much everything. More succinctly than I could with more words. I'm a talker. I've written poetry and made things with my hands for as long as I can remember, but it was during a particularly difficult period of my life when I was 26 that I felt struck by an unshakeable urge to make a piece of jewelry. I took the subway down to the diamond district to pick up a few supplies, then back up to my sister's apartment to borrow her pliers. That night I stayed up late making necklaces and felt the clouds around me dissipate. I've been fascinated by jewelry, sculpture, collage, metalwork, and printmaking in the years since.
Years ago as a Kindergarten teacher, I became a humanist and advocate for children and meaningful learning at all stages of life. I still organize communities in support of public school students and teach creative processes in art workshops. My work as an artist and my work as an educator are two sides of the same coin. To feel I really have something, I have to give it away.
Q: You work with metal, clay, glass, silver, cyanotype, paper. That's a lot of different processes. Do they talk to each other, or are they separate worlds?
A: I'm drawn to superposition, applying mixed media collage to clay sculpture, affixing chains and jewelry findings to functional wall hanging objects, and enshrining cyanotype prints in metal. I combine processes in ways that feel both intuitive and, occasionally, intentional. The challenge here is restraint, not generation. Meditation is deeply important to me in daily life, and it's crucial to feeling that what I make and say is truthful. With a clear mind, I'm able to combine mediums as different as lead-free solder, clay, and collage fluidly, without overcrowding.
Q: You call your finished pieces "artifacts from higher worlds." That's a strong claim. What does a piece need to feel like that to you?
A: I like to say that working hands are higher power's messengers on earth. I think this is true for artists, farmers, carpenters… anyone working with their hands. When my body is in direct conversation with my tools, I exercise technical skill, yes. But I also work through aspects of my being that elude rationality, and experience a sense of communion with a source beyond. The resulting works feel heavier in my hands than the sum of their parts because the process was a conversation between my body and something beyond it—the inexplicable part of consciousness that's planted a vision and tasked my hands to complete it. I borrow the term "higher worlds" from Rudolf Steiner, a philosopher whose teachings on nature, extrasensory perception, and art as spiritual activity inspire my thinking.
Q: You were born and raised in New York but have deep roots in northern Spain. How does that duality play out in the work?
A: New York City reveals an essential truth of interconnectivity that my fellow New Yorkers know well. Musicians busk on the subway while someone screams plaintively on the other end of the platform. A teenager helps a mom carry her stroller up the steps to the street, where nearly 9 million more private worlds are colliding. There is a sense of the sacred in a kind of impossible togetherness, the unexpected kindnesses, and the current of contradictions that makes New York City so undefinable. Northern Spain, by contrast, is rugged coast and foggy mists shrouding leafy green mountaintops. It's a culture with a rich mysticism influenced by Celtic traditions and its own topography. A cloud of butterflies—an animal to which I'm averse, by the way—once showed me the way home when I was lost in the forest. I'm fascinated by the human, the natural, the sacred, and the points at which these converge unexpectedly. New York City and Asturias reflect that essential convergence I seek to express in my work, particularly in pieces marked by jarring juxtapositions.
Q: You seem drawn to moments when things go wrong in the studio, when clay cracks, when ink runs. What happens for you in those moments?
A: When materials misbehave or reveal our error, we're presented with two choices: walk away or make the art, no matter what it takes. Choosing the path of supple determination is what makes you an artist. Supple because you release a kind of attachment. Determination because your sense of self is tied up in executing a vision lying just beyond the objects before you, broken or cracked or otherwise off. Your determination allows you to see that these pieces will come together. Because you will make it so.
And in that faith and willingness to return to it, you deepen a relationship with yourself. You grow stronger. To me, being an artist, especially a self-taught one, requires feeling at home in—at least making peace with—that cyclical process of experimentation, release, and determination. And the inevitable failure that comes with it. Every crack in a clay piece I've worked on for hours, every snagged chain, every revelatory cyanotype rinse gone wrong, every misfired silver clay… brings me closer to myself and to the work I'm making. A piece that results from this cycle is not a static object but an artifact of a quest from which I emerge changed.
Q: What are you making right now?
A: I'm drawn to combining collage with sculpture to make functional pieces like Lucid Dream, experimenting with alternative jewelry making techniques, and exploring new approaches to precious metal clay. Teaching my processes in workshops here in New York City has brought me so much joy, I could cry. And did after the first few. The exchange of energy between students, tools, materials, and ideas is its own dimension, one that I love and feel at home in. In the studio, with my community, moving around New York and the world, I'm still making myself, too. Creating thoughts and belief systems that will sustain my work and draw me closer to the world I dream of.
