The Desparate Deck of Cards

Yes, necessity is the mother of invention.  That's what gave birth to a handmade deck of cards.  Though I have prettier objects that form memories of  our 1999 trip to Mexico, these little pieces of paper are special.  It began bumpily yet ended with an expansion of my creative work.

We had visited Oaxaca in southern Mexico the year before for ten days, spent some time with a weaver in the town of Teotitlan. and decided to return for a longer time.  Oaxaca, the big city center, is surrounded by small Indian villages famous for various crafts.  Our guide had been Susan, an American woman who ran a coffee and bagel (yes!) shop.  After seeing all the area had to offer, we learned she could arrange for us to learn natural wool-dyeing with indigo and cochineal, the brilliant red color.  We'd return to stay with a weaver we'd met in Teotilan who had given a good introduction to dyeing and could teach us off-loom weaving.  ins Teotitlan, the village famous for its woven rugs.

By the time we were ready to return the following winter, Susan had had a falling out with the weaver we'd visited with the year before.  Not to worry, she'd found "Raul & Beatriz and family," as she drove  us to their home in the town.  One thing:  we would not be staying with them for the week but in a home they'd built outside the village.  They would pick us up for breakfast and the afternoon meal. 

We never met Raul (and did not dye or weave.)  Their teenage daughter, who unlike her mother spoke English,  drove us us from the town center to a very large house in the middle of nowhere.   She'd return in the morning.  There was no phone, no windows, no locks on doors.  When evening came, we realized we should have bought food for dinner.  I'd brought along a small flashlight used for "Moonsnail Saves Planet," the opening night performance of my last exhibit in Maryland.  It's little beam made it possible to find the way to the main road where we'd noticed a restaurant on our way in. 

Genial man came onto the second floor balcony, "Sorry, we're not open tonight.  Come back tomorrow!"  As we wondered what to do next, a pick-up truck stopped pulled up.  Spanish and a little English got across the idea that the elderly couple in it were the parents of Beatriz--and the restaurant owner.  They took us back to the village where a wonderful street cart served up hamburgers.  Our meal provided the surrounding community a chance to observe the "locos Americanos" stuck in the Mexican boonies.  All very gracious; the pick-up returned to take us back.

And the deck of cards?  We had a room with a couch and a bare lightbulb overhead.  Reading as long as we could, after several days--we were there for Christmas week--something else was needed.  We made the cards and played gin rummy. 

Better adventures awaited us at breakfast.  We'd first go to the market, shop for our dinner, take showers, sit at the family table in Beatriz' home-plus-studio.  I stared at the skeins of yarn hanging from the ceiling--indigo blue and . The color, in all its variations everywhere, and I began to think what I could do with this vibrant cochineal dyed yarn.

This is how I came to knit interpretations of red wiggler worms. 

I digress for background info.

Kitchen composting and the worms had become my art form soon after our 1995 move to New York.  My life as a public artist has not followed a tidy path. Back in the City, I found a brochure in the laundry room of my building.  Writing the Personal Essay, a weekend class at the nearby YMCA.  There I wrote "Composting in Manhattan," a slightly embroidered telling of our life with red wigglers.  The title seemed right as a metaphor for our return and our stage of life.  In various unlikely venues I performed my tale, made art books.  (Posted about it here on the blog.) 

A couple of artists encouraged me to apply for an art grant to mount something more ambitious, to reach more people about the need for urban dwellers to dispose of food waste by bringing einsenia fetida into their apartments. An immodest proposal, yes, but an engaging one.

A grant?  I'd never written one.  Who would give money to an old lady who'd never been to art school?  After dragging my feet for a couple of years, I finally took the application material--very uncomplicated--with me to the airport as we started this trip. With my WormWare box, world's smallest composter, beside me, I did the unthinkable:  wrote it by hand on lined notebook paper.  Described how I hoped to find a group of "seniors,"--yes, that's who we are to the world--who would join me in kitchen composting, then form a troupe to celebrate the scheduled closing of the City's enormous garbage dump, Fresh Kills in 2001.

Back in Oaxaca City, I bought knitting needles, found a wonderful studio in a new, art school, Sachmo Centro de Arte.  I did a one evening performance, "Agua y Abono," at the end of our stay about the connection of water to compost.  On the wall behind me are rubbings of water meters; another time I'll post some.  Ron took Spanish classes. It was on this trip that he became interested in weaving, a craft he's only recently reconnected with. 

Puffin Foundation gave me the modest grant.  Again my friend, Miriam Schaer, advised, "Apply for your next one...a bigger one!"  I did, got it too. That is the why and how of my knitting 150 red wiggler worms for "This Dirt Museum:  the Ladies' Room," an art installation with three working compost bins, compost education, activities for all ages in Spanish, Mandarin, English.  It opened in October 2001 at Queens Botanical Garden.  [More at Cityworm, my website.]

 

Comments

[Xtreme English]

That's an AMAZING post! Did you know there's a town in the mountains near Oaxaca where something like 35% of the children are born deaf? I think it has to do with the lead mining???