1/18/2024 0 Comments Julia premium artisan jewelry![]() Julia is an artist, not a maker of alebrijes, she says. Most carvers make alebrijes, fantastical creatures, sometimes mass-produced, that spring as much from myth as movies and comic books. Julia Fuentes combines the spirit of her Zapotec ancestors with advanced conservatory training to produce exquisitely carved and brilliantly painted animals made from copal, a tree whose resin produced the incense that pre-Columbian Mesoamericans used in burial ceremonies.įor generations, her family has lived in Tilcajete, where woodcarving is the economic base. Loosely fitted, dozens of tiny pieces then are soldered together atop a piece of smooth charcoal, then decorated with pearls and semiprecious stones.Ī single piece can take two to three weeks to finish. With hammers, pliers and scissors, he painstakingly crafts a single thread into delicate curlicues – many smaller than a match head – arranging shapes into a single piece. ![]() The pieces are constructed from a single piece of thin, handmade wire in a style largely unknown outside Oaxaca.Īrturo demonstrates by using a blowtorch to melt several large silver coins, turning the liquid into fine, silver strands in a complicated, exacting, multistep process that takes several hours, flattening and scoring with heat to create textures. Master jeweler Arturo Salgado has trained his three daughters to design and build intricate, delicate, silver and gold filigree called cartoneado. “Every plant is different, every combination is different, every day is different.” The work brings her life meaning, she says. The family speaks the nearly lost Zapotec language among themselves, and no written directions record the chemical process needed to free the dye from the plant-and-bug combinations. Inspired by the plants, flowers, animals, skies, deserts, mountains, Juana imagines the hues she wants to see, then combines ingredients, boiling and stirring, dipping skeins of yarn into cauldrons the size of small kitchen tables set atop wood fires. When squished, the bugs create a seeping red so like blood I flinched when I saw it spreading across Juana Gutierrez’s hands.Ĭochineals are an important part of Juana’s creative process, as are the burlap sacks filled with seeds, pods, fruits and plants that surround the stone metate she uses to grind the pigments for her dyes. In the courtyard where they work, aged trees shade hand-hewn chairs and tables, spools, spinning wheels and looms, the walls decorated with drying, spiny cactus lobes covered in cochineal bugs that look like puffs of white fluff. ![]() The Gutierrezes and about a half dozen other families weave as their ancestors did centuries ago, with local wool and natural dyes. They’re as varied as fingerprints, and a single piece can take eight months to finish. The Gutierrez family creates intricate, complex combinations of patterns and colors to make carpets and tapestries with a vibrancy rarely seen outside of nature. (Teotitlan del Valle is east of Oaxaca City off Highway 190 on the road to the archaeological ruins at Mitla.) The best elevate their craft to new levels, embracing the essence of Jorge Luis Borges’ description of art: “Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places, try to tell us something, or have said something, we should not have missed.”Īll but one of the artists profiled here live and work south of Oaxaca City in small pueblos off the main artery Highway 175, called Ruta Mágica de las Artesanías. Even fewer visitors connect those ancient burial grounds to the artists living in Teotitlan, Xoxocotlan, Tilcajete and San Bartolo Coyotepec, who trace their language, culture, roots and inspiration to the tombs that hold the dust of their ancestors. Few tourists venture into the rural pueblos where the artisans live, following instead predictable roads to the pre-Columbian Zapotec “cities of death,” Monte Alban and Mitla. ![]()
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