Category: Travel

Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Threading together women’s stories

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Above: Installation by Elena Martinez Bolio included in “Una Larga Hebra/A Long Stitch” at Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca

As an artist, I am a conduit so that the moment of creation, which is so vast and profound, can emerge from the simplicity and humility of a needle. That is what I try to express in this exhibition, to marvel again and to find meanings in the garments we wear day by day, because they record memories of what is ours.” 

Elena Martinez Bolio, “A Long Thread“

Artist Elena Martinez Bolio has spent years working alongside women in villages of the Yucatan. She has learned their techniques for what has often been dismissed as mere domestic craft and liberated those applications to relate her personal stories and theirs. We were fortunate to catch an exhibition of her work, “A Long Stitch,” at the Museum of Cultures of Oaxaca this past spring.

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Time to weigh your blog consumption

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Above: A peacock on the grounds of Real Alcazar in Seville, Spain

Are you sure you’re feeling okay? On examining the list of the most-read posts during the past twelve months, it hit me what is missing. Food. I think this might be the first time since launching these biannual roundups that not one post about restaurants appears on the list. Perhaps while I’m out plumping up during travels, all my readers are on Ozempic.

It always surprises me how different my list of favorites would be than yours. Your interests remain all over the map, which is good because postcard delivery lags way behind our travels. I have a full album of photos waiting to pop up willy-nilly from Mexico, Italy, Spain, England, France, Turkey and the Netherlands.

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Postcard from London, England: ‘Strange bedfellows’ for eternity

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Above left: Monumental effigy of Mary Queen of Scots (1542-1587). Above right: Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603). Lady Chapel, Westminster Abbey

There is no other shelter hereabouts: misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” 

The Tempest, William Shakespeare, 1611

In recent years, you’ve been exposed to an immense quantity of footage showing the interior of Westminster Abbey: the wedding of Prince and Princess of Wales in 2011; the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022); and the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla in 2023.

With no need to cover that aspect, this taphophile is jumping straight to the everyday role of Westminster – a splendid monumental cemetery housing the remains of more than 3,300 elite, a veritable who’s-who of a thousand years of British history. Grave markers underfoot lie ignored, overwhelmed by the sculptural and polychrome effigies and memorials climbing ever higher up the church walls.

If ghosts rise in the night, what bedlam must reign. According to the Westminster website, the remains of 13 kings, four queens regnant, 11 queens consort, and two more queens are interred there. Blood might run thicker than water, yet British bluebloods frequently spilled that of their kin.

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