A pile of pink and orange tulle rises into a soft mountain on the gallery floor inside the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs. Nearby, cascading blue fabric hangs like waterfalls as birds chirp quietly through the gallery.
The installations are part of a show called “Cantando Bajito” by artist Ana María Hernando. Her work invites visitors to slow down and reconsider what it means to be soft.
For Hernando, her work is both a sensory experience and a reflection on the emotional climate of the moment.
“I wanted this to be a space for people to feel their feelings and to relate,” Hernando said. “Not only with their head and thoughts, but also with their body.”
Much of the exhibit centers on textiles, a medium Hernando has explored for decades. Fabric, she said, offers an immediate point of connection because it’s something everyone understands physically due to our clothes and other things in our homes.
Singing softly
The exhibition’s title roughly translates to “singing softly.” Hernando described it as a kind of quiet, spontaneous singing.
“It’s the kind of singing you do for no one else,” she said. “You do it because you cannot contain it.”
That joy and peace are reflected in the show. Hernando hopes visitors leave feeling calm yet nourished.
“I want my work to be like a vitamin for people,” Hernando said. “I feel that we are being so depleted by all the worry, all the news, everything happening in the world.”
Softness as power
Many of Hernando’s sculptures include tulle — a material often associated with ballet costumes or wedding dresses — clothes traditionally considered hyper feminine or “young and naive,” Hernando said. She intentionally works with those associations and pushes back on those narratives.
“I’m very interested in power,” she said. “But the power from the point of view of the feminine.”
For Hernando, that version of power is collaborative rather than demeaning.
“We are all powerful and if I’m powerful, I don’t need to make you less,” she said. “I make you more.”
The tulle also allows her to layer colors the way a painter blends paint together.
A community-made mountain
One of the exhibit’s central works, “Making a Mountain,” was created in Boulder with help from community members.
Hernando invited volunteers to sew long strands of tulle together during a collaborative workshop. As participants stitched, they fed the growing fabric structure into the center of a circle of tables until it formed a large mound.
The piece reflects themes that recur throughout her work: cooperation, persistence and collective strength.
“When we come together, we can make big things like mountains,” she said.
The installation will also become part of a performance planned later during the exhibition.
Listening to the world
Sound plays a role throughout the show.
In one gallery, bird recordings accompany delicately embroidered pieces. The installation grew out of a project Hernando began in 2020.
While preparing for a residency in France, she asked small groups of participants to listen to birds and translate those sounds into embroidery. But when the pandemic shut down travel and gatherings, she expanded the project.
Hernando emailed friends around the world and asked them to send recordings of what they heard in their environments.
“Because the world went so quiet, we could hear sounds that before we couldn’t hear,” Hernando said.
People sent more than 200 recordings. Hernando listened to them repeatedly, imagining the landscapes where they were captured and translating the sounds into the colors and shapes of her own embroideries.
“It helped me not to be alone in the midst of the pandemic,” she said.
Choosing softness
Hernando, who grew up in Argentina and has lived in the United States for 40 years, sees the exhibit as a quiet response to the turbulent political and social times we live in. Rather than confrontation, her work emphasizes kindness, joy and everyday gestures of care.
“I want to remember to be kind to each other,” she said.
Even small moments — in a grocery store, on the road, passing strangers — can become opportunities to practice that approach.
“I see that for me personally, when I can be in that space of gentle relating to others, I’m happier with that,” Hernando said. “And I feel it’s a choice I make.”
For Hernando, choosing softness in a difficult world is not weakness.
It’s a form of strength.
Ana María Hernando: Cantando Bajito is at the Fine Arts Center at Colorado College in Colorado Springs through July 3, 2026.
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