Renata Fernandez's ink works emerge from our image-saturated digital world, where photographs are endlessly consumed yet instantly forgotten. Her practice—deeply informed by her background as a journalist—seeks to reclaim these fleeting fragments, transforming ephemeral social media content into enduring material objects that interrogate how digital imagery shapes personal and collective memory.

Through meticulous ink-on-paper renderings, Fernandez explores the tension between our virtual and physical experiences. Each work begins with images culled from her social media feed—ranging from intimate personal moments to global news events—that resonate on both aesthetic and sociopolitical levels. In an act of deliberate alchemy: a slow, meditative process that elevates disposable content into contemplative artefacts.

Her ongoing series My Social Media Feed in Ink began during the pandemic as small 13 x 13 cm drawings, growing into an archive of nearly 200 works exhibited in Cartography of Care at Edinburgh's Spilt Milk Gallery (2022). These pieces form a visual diary that captures the dissonant intimacy of algorithmically curated feeds—where family snapshots coexist with war documentation, and holiday photos brush against consumer advertisements.

In larger works, Fernandez adopts a more painterly approach while maintaining her digital source material. Created on acid-free Foamex or paper mounted on calico, these pieces take form as banners, cut-outs, or free-standing sculptures. Their physical presence—whether as intimate drawings demanding close viewing or expansive installations recreating digital abundance—underscores the paradox of our mediated existence: images that feel intensely personal yet are globally disseminated, fleeting in their native form yet made permanent through material translation.

Fernandez's works do not aspire to hyperrealism, but rather to a different kind of "realness"—one that evokes deeper connection through the handmade mark. The ink becomes both medium and metaphor: a permanent substance fixing transient images, a traditional medium engaging with contemporary visual culture. This practice serves as both resistance to and documentation of our digital consumption patterns, offering viewers space to reconsider how images shape identity, memory, and our understanding of reality.

By materializing these fragments, Fernandez constructs a visual lexicon that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant. Her work invites us to pause within the ceaseless scroll—to examine what we retain, what we discard, and why certain images persist in our consciousness long after we've swiped past them