MUD AND VIGAS
Several years ago, I took a series of photographs that I named Walls and Windows. It was an exploration of Taos Pueblo’s famed architecture up close, focusing not on the iconic “macro” imagery seen everywhere, but instead, on its constituent elements. This one had special resonance for me.
The building of which this wall is a part is at least 800 years old. This same wall — this same home — has stood all that time, through temperatures up to 100 and down to forty below, through flooding monsoonal rains and blizzards and raging windstorms, maintaining its essential structural integrity and identity. Built of our local earth, shored up by vigas cut from the forests of our lands, it has housed and protected its family even unto the seventh generation and beyond. Every few years, the adobe is resurfaced, and beneath the vigas, the fresh mudding shows. Both new and old, it’s a refacing and refreshing that keeps the whole intact, yet it’s done using the same earth the original masons used in building. It’s yet another way our ancestors touch our hands from beyond, guiding us, protecting us, preserving the old ways for future generations in the most fundamental sense: Shelter. Home.
Signed on white matting; black wooden frame.
Size including frame: 18.5″ by 24.25″.
$775 + $125 shipping, handling, and insurance.
