Some days, everything seems impossible. The wind rises before daylight; sun and cold contest for primacy, the latter stealing breath and numbing skin even as the former turns the snow to muck. Much of the ground is a quagmire now, frozen red earth turned to a cold, wet mass of muddy suction, interspersed here and there with thick rough-frozen ice.
And these days, it feels like metaphor made real. Too much of life at the moment is waiting to bog us down, not merely impede our progress but halt it altogether. The new calendar year seems eager to disabuse us of any notions of an easier path.
On days such as this, when the mud seems to have overtaken everything, drawing our gaze downward with the force of a thousand magnets, lest we slip and fall, it’s hard to remember to look up, to find the blue of the sky. But even on days that pull our gaze resolutely downward, the horizon remains visible, if only just: a reminder that this muddy red-earth world remains edged in blue.
It’s a perfect analogue, too, to today’s featured work — the last of Mark’s small maidens given form and shape in the red of the earth seeping through a pale cover, but topped with bits of evergreen and the edging arc of an indigo sky. From its description in the Other Artists: Sculpture gallery here on the site:
Master carver Mark Swazo-Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo) coaxes stylized Corn Maidens from plain smooth blocks of stone. Each is hand-carved from very pale, very fine pink sandstone, almost a translucent peach in color. With surfaces so smooth you can hardly keep from touching them, they feel a bit like large worry stones. In lieu of the traditional tablita headdress, each wears Mark’s trademark bundle of brilliantly-hued macaw feathers. Sculpture stands 3″-4″ high (dimensions approximate). Other views shown at the link.
Pink sandstone; macaw feather bundles
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Of the two smallest works in this collection, this has always been my favorite. Its twin is perhaps simpler, more elegantly perfect in its execution, but this one feathers, flowers, in the shades of the natural world — the orange-red of the local earth, the evergreen of cedar and piñon, and the brilliant blue of the desert sky.
It’s a reminder, in these difficult days of ice and mud, bitterly cold winds and simultaneously a too-warm sun, to lift our heads from the muck occasionally: to notice the beauty of our broader world, a world edged in blue.
~ Aji
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