A MEMORY OF A CIRCLE

I made the photograph for this piece in 2015 in Oaxaca. Thirty-eight years earlier in 1981, I made the drawing on the right as a part of a series of drawings I did that year. I put this drawing into a box and forgot about it until I rediscovered it in 2019 while I was pairing down the contents of hundreds of boxes in preparation for my move to California. I was astonished by the eerie similarity in the composition and color palette of my photograph and my drawing, a drawing I had made thirty-four years before I took the photograph. 

Apparently, the image in this drawing that I had created many years ago had stayed lodged in my subconscious, only to be awakened by what I saw on a wall in the streets of Oaxaca some thirty years later. When I came upon the wall during my wanderings through Oaxaca, it attracted me, so I photographed it, although I had no memory of the drawing. The epiphany came only when I rediscovered this drawing! In 2021, with the help of the team at CaSa in Oaxaca, we created this textile based on the photograph, which has its foundation as a drawing. 

BACKGROUND

These large felted textiles are fabricated in Oaxaca at Taller de Afelpado. This felting workshop is located in the Centro de las Artes de San Agustin, a fine arts center in San Agustin, Etla referred to colloquially as CaSa. 

Each work takes approximately three artisans three weeks to complete. These works were started in 2019 and completed in March 2022. Over the last two years I have not traveled to Oaxaca because of the pandemic. Through complete trust with the CaSa team this collaborative process has continued in a remote way. Often the Taller staff has worked on these textiles from their own homes loved in the municipalities of the District of Etla, Oaxaca. 

The photographs from which these textiles are derived were made over the last eight years during frequent trips to Oaxaca. 

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