Series in progress and ongoing

Large volcanic rocks from Michoacán cast using mulbery rice paper, flour

Approximately 36” x 48” each

 

Interactive element: Can be hung and configured in groupings as desired, indoors on floor, ceiling, rafters, or outdoors in trees, fields, streams

 

The past 18 years have been spent in the kitchen, preparing sustenance for my mixed-race daughter with roots in Zapotec and European settler traditions. As my daughter leaves to gain scholarly sustenance, I return to the kitchen but now to prepare mixtures for reviving an art practice. Homemade gesso, prepared rabbit skin glue, whipped wheat paste, and delicate egg tempera are my recipes.

 

Emanuele Coccia writes that where philosophy of the last two millennia focused on the city, contemporary philosophy must think the city from the home, and the home from the kitchen. The kitchen becomes a laboratory for the preparation of meals. Happiness begins in the kitchen—the heart of the home—and turns its attention to the cosmos from there. The modern-day project of globalizing the city must be replaced by one that opens up our houses and apartments so that we are in touch with the earth.

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Living between two countries and raising a bi-cultural daughter, I have spent time in rural Mexico where land and sky have informed my work. At Guapamácataro, Michoacán, I created translucent sculptures by molding mulberry rice paper and wheat paste over large volcanic boulders strewn over hectares of farmland. The enormous, heavy boulders are suddenly light and easily inverted, suspended above the earth where they are visually transformed into clouds floating above the fields. The weight of the boulders, made over millennia by the elements, is removed allowing them to evaporate again into the sky to become sun, wind, and rain once again. Sky and ground are condensed in one image and their conjoining is a metaphor for the traditions of the two lands that comprise my child. Coccia said that we must each turn our home into a true planet, a space that can accommodate everyone and everything. This seems even more appropriate given that Guapamacátaro, in the Purhépecha language, means ‘place where the children fly’.

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