Some of Ana Mendieta's best-known works are barely there at all. In one documentary photograph from 1979, a human form is pressed into the mud of a dried-out riverbank among similar natural shapes; in another from 1978, a few shimmering leaves, flowers and branches sketch the ghost of a woman against a dark tree trunk. A major survey at Tate Modern now asks visitors to take notice of the earth, the power of the female body and the practice behind those fleeting gestures.

The exhibition avoids a chronological route, organising works instead by the physical and metaphorical places they belong to, such as The Grove, The School and The Sacred Grounds. The approach points to the site-specific core of Mendieta's work: each piece was made in dialogue with a location of personal, ecological or spiritual significance. As the exhibition's wall text explains, she described her practice as an attempt to return to the maternal source, a response to being cast from the womb of nature through her exile from Cuba as a child.

The show opens with The Cave, a section of late works from the 1980s, including her very last video piece, Ochun, from 1981, and a group of rupestrian sculptures inspired by prehistoric rock art. Where the famous Silueta series generally features an imprint or silhouette of Mendieta's own body, these lesser-known later works are more open-ended. Their female forms are borrowed not from the artist's anatomy but from the natural shapes of rocks and prehistoric representations of goddesses.

The survey makes the case that Mendieta's achievement lies in that sustained conversation between body and landscape. Across four decades of work, the ground itself becomes the medium: mud, leaves, stone and fire carry the figure, and the figure, in turn, gives the landscape a human presence that lingers after the artist has gone.