Maria-Theresa Fernandes was born to Goan Indian parents in Kenya in 1944. She immigrated to London in 1965 to study initially at the Sir John Cass College in London and spent over a decade in the UK, establishing herself as a textile artist, before moving to the USA.
Artist Maria-Theresa Fernandes was born in Kenya to Goan Indian parents in 1944 and came of age in a richly multicultural East African environment. In 1965, she moved to London to pursue her artistic education, initially enrolling at Sir John Cass College before transferring to Manchester College of Art. In the late 1960s, London’s cultural vibrancy, from pop music to fashion, provided an exhilarating backdrop for her developing practice. However, it was during her time in Manchester that Fernandes discovered a deep interest in fibre arts, turning to embroidery as her primary mode of expression, which was regarded as an unconventional choice at the time. Embroidery was often dismissed as craft, but Fernandes embraced the medium for its tactile potential and narrative power.
Fernandes’s oeuvre is shaped by the experience of travel and relocation, and she has drawn on her diverse background to create richly textured works that reflect on displacement, cultural memory, and social injustice. Her early works were layered with stitch and pigment, provoking confusion in audiences unaccustomed to such hybridity in fibre art. Over the years, she has developed a greater process-driven approach, often incorporating digital photography, collage, and laser cutting, alongside hand and machine embroidery. Thematically, her work explores the complexities of place, identity, and the marginalised. Informed by her Indian heritage and diasporic experiences, projects such as Dowry Brides (2000) reflect on gendered traditions and systemic oppression. Similarly, works produced in response to Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore, USA, integrate poetic text and imagery, foregrounding racial injustice and unrest. Fernandes also considers the historical and symbolic role of cloth - used to swaddle the living and shroud the dead - as a vehicle for storytelling and collective memory. Fernandes’ works combine stitching, applique, and mixed media to construct a visual language rooted in social commentary, memory, and material storytelling. There are recurring strategies throughout her work: stitched text, fragmented imagery, symbolic motifs, and irregular book-like formats. Fabric is treated not only as surface but also as archive: it is layered with emotional and historical resonance. The interplay of hand embroidery, found materials, and painterly textile manipulation situates these works within traditions of craft activism and feminist practice, insisting on the tactile as a mode of resistance.
Fernandes has lived a peripatetic life and, while she is currently based in the USA, much of her professional life has taken place in the UK. After graduation in Manchester, she moved to Northern Ireland and then to the USA and then moved back to the UK, settling for 12 years in the London borough of Newham, before relocating once again to Baltimore. However, she maintained strong artistic ties to the UK. Her solo exhibitions in the UK include Maria Theresa Fernandes: sewn and painted textiles, drawings held at London's Commonwealth Institute (1977), Place at Grassroots in Newham (2011) and East End Plus at Curlew Rowing Club, Greenwich (2013). She has also participated in group exhibitions in the UK, such as Art of the Stitch at the Mall Galleries, London (2000). In 2010, her work featured in the Royal Historic Palaces’ exhibition, Cabinet of Curiosities at Kensington Palace. Fernandes’s practice has consistently pushed the boundaries of fibre art, and she has been included in international biennials, triennials and exhibitions in Argentina, Hungary, Belgium, France, South Korea and others.
A frequent collaborator with poets and community-based organisations, Fernandes has developed projects engaging with themes such as homelessness, domestic violence, incarceration, and slavery. Her research into the 19th-century fugitive, Ann Maria Weems, conducted at the Beall-Dawson Museum in Maryland, USA, resulted in a body of work examining the protective power of textiles during slavery. Other recent series have responded to the contested presence of Confederate monuments in the American South and the enduring traumas of gun violence. In 2019, a trip to Cape Town, South Africa, prompted an installation titled A Patch of Cape Town, highlighting the architectural divisions of the city’s Malay and township communities. This work, combining traditional embroidery with laser-cut wood, exemplifies Fernandes’s multidisciplinary approach and her interest in layering materials, histories, and personal response. Maria-Theresa Fernandes lives and works in Baltimore, USA. In the UK public domain her works are held in the Embroiderers' Guild collection.