ecoArts IV - Playing with Madre Tierra

March 29 2025, New Moon in Aries, Partial Solar Eclipse

Sacred Valley of the Incase, Peru.

Mural using clay and oxide bound by nopal - march 29 2025, Lamay, Sacred Valley of the Incas, Peru

If you've been following my ecoArts odyssey, you might wonder what happened to ecoArts II and III. Well, Covid happened and life took a detour. Seriously. My ecoArts adventure kept rolling in Oaxaca but didn't quite make it to this diary. I've decided to leave a placeholder from those stories—partly as a nudge to type them in someday but also, sometimes in life, there're absent spaces that don't necessarily need to be filled in. Especially when they're tucked in a past I'm not itching to revisit right this moment. That doesn't mean they're less significant or that I didn't learn a thing or two, it just is so and it's ok to keep it so.

Returning to the present in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, Peru. Just like in Oaxaca, the Andean communities here have a tradition of making natural dyes from whatever they find locally—plants, stones, insects— to dye textiles and threads for making clothes, woolens, rugs, and so on. While the fast-food culture of the world has crept in and now one can see textiles dyed with artificial colors in the so-called artisanal markets, there remain communities up in the mountains—like Chawaytiri and Chinchero—who've held on to their old-school dye ways. I love their passion for perseverance!

Unlike in Oaxaca, they didn't take the next step of separating the pigment and the water from the dye to use for painting. In so far as I've found in my tromps in this part of the world, most art beyond textiles leans on using clay, stones, and oxides—think murals, pottery, and ceramics. There's not much of a painting tradition like there is with weaving. Of course, you'll find paintings here, especially while strolling in Cusco. Be ready to be hassled by local artists with their miniature watercolors for a few soles. Art galleries are everywhere, stuffed with cliche acrylic paintings, think Macchu Picchu. But this is relatively new, not an art handed down through generations like textile dyeing.

So, what's special in this corner of the world—other than dyeing, which I already dug into in Oaxaca? Murals made with clay, stones, and oxides.

Heydi Mori Alvarado, a Peruvian artist from central Peru, and her husband Rodrigo (also an artist) organized a day-long workshop with an Argentinian artist to show us how it's done. Over centuries, each region has found ways to make art with what's available locally, sometimes integrating with materials brought by traders/travelers from afar (e.g. Cochineal arrived here from Mexico and was integrated into the Andean textile dyeing). In this workshop, I learned a different use of Nopal, a cactus that grows abundantly in these parts. In Mexico, Nopal is the home turf for breeding the Cochineal insect from which the bright red color is made. Here, I learned that a solution made with Nopal is used as a binder for clay and a mixture of clay + oxide to make different colors. And so we spent the day playing with clay and different oxides that Mar, the Argentinian teacher, brought with her—some from central Bolivia and some from Peru.

Give me paints, colors, and brushes and I turn into a kid let loose in a candy store! Another enriching experience of working with natural materials that I'm tucking away into my knowledge bank, to use in my artworks someday—whenever that "someday" rolls around.