Tag: travel

Postcard from Oaxaca: Weaving new translations of ancient traditions

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The magic of the first carpet had our attention. And the second. Brilliant colors, traditional patterns passed from wrinkled hands to nimble young fingers generation after generation in villages in the interior of Mexico.

Santiago Borja’s carpet appears traditional at its heart but melts into modernism at its edges. Weavers from the workshop of Jeronimo Hernandez in Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, completed its execution.

But then something happened on the next wall. The scarf escaping from the flat surface, its fringe fluttering free as though a butterfly freed from its cocoon…

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…a phrase too obviously transitioning to the title of the exhibition at the Museo Textil de Oaxaca – Cocoon Me from My Feet Up: Traditional and Contemporary Carpets. Curator OlgaMargarita Davila assembled work by 18 artists from four countries “to connect ourselves with the meaning of the fabric we inhabit: our body.”

Bodies resembling dancing Guatemalan worry dolls bob along the top and bottom of a linear weaving by Susan Martin Maffei whose website explains:

Crocheted 3 dimensional trims, quipus and found objects enhance the narrative visuals of many works, influenced by textile forms and embellishments of the many ancient cultures I have explored.

An “unwrapped” piece caught my eye, but then the artist almost cheated to make me a fan – a postcard. He created a postcard to the curator to accompany one of his pieces.

….there is such a contribution to be made by adapting examples from the history of our chosen medium and quietly exploring a simple form or image through line, grid-form or in separate units, repeating and developing it again and again.

Archie Brennan, Tapestry Art Today, Summer 2004

And then, he has such a fine last name.

Magic of Lanterns in Montréal: But who invited the Monkey King?

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The banquet we would all love to attend: The Feast of Peaches hosted by Xi Wang Mu. The menu is the main attraction because Xi Wang Mu, the Queen of the West, offers her guests peaches of immortality.

This feast is the theme of the 20th annual Magic of Lanterns display at the Montréal Botanical Garden. During the event, 700 traditional and 200 themed lanterns cast shimmering light throughout the Chinese Garden and the Japanese Garden. While designed in Canada, these are crafted in Shanghai, where lanterns have been part of festivities since the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.).

Wanting to find out more about the availability of those luscious-sounding peaches,  I turned to the Internet. There are numerous academically styled accounts of the Celestial Queen’s crop, but I prefer the less reverent one found on GodChecker:

Xi-Wangmu started off at the bottom. She was a plague-carrying tiger spirit at the time of the Han Dynasty and caused much trouble. 

But after offering the Emperor a bowl of magic peaches, her career really took off. Daoism came along and elevated her to Top Goddess. She married Mu-Gong, otherwise known as Mr. Yang, and became Mrs. Yin, the personification of Femininity.

Taking up residence in paradise, she began to be associated with immortality…. Xi-Wangmu now grows magic peach trees in her Heavenly Peach Garden. The most common of these take a thousand years to blossom — but the Golden Peaches of Immortality only ripen once in nine thousand years.

Eating one of Xi-Wangmu’s peaches bestows immediate long life and a host of other benefits. The Gods like them so much that Peach Banquets are a regular occurrence in Heaven.

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From the number of posts I have made, one would assume we spent our entire two-week vacation at the Botanical Garden. Unfortunately, however, we were not present in the evening when the lantern lights were not forced to compete with the sun. But here is one of numerous videos found online:

And, alas, we were served none of the Queen’s magical peaches. It was like visiting the Garden of Eden after the apple was bitten, thanks to that trickster, the Monkey King. According to GodChecker:

The last Peach Banquet was cancelled after Monkey ate all the peaches, but bookings are currently being taken for the next one in 5078 A.D. 

I hope the Monkey King’s invitation gets lost.

Update Added on October 17: Totally missed the news that this year’s Dallas State Fair featured a Chinese Lantern Festival. The home of Big Tex actually squeezed in more themed lanterns than Montréal.

Everything has to be bigger in the big-hair part of Texas, and the Dallas lanterns go one step farther with animation and blinking LEDs.

What else can you expect from the fried food fanatical land where awards are lavished upon such concoctions as fried bacon cinnamon rolls?

But even taken this far over the top, the lanterns look magical.

Update on October 20: I sure hope my mention of him is not what made Big Tex’s ears burn. Alas, Big Tex met the same fate as all the food in the booths around him. Fried.

Postcard from the Montréal Botanical Garden

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I will also confess that, during all the time since I have seen you, I have not been able to put your botanical garden scheme out of my mind. I should have been glad – and I still uphold this offer – to make a design for your garden entirely free of cost to you, simply, because the problem attracts me. You see, it has been my dream, for ever since in 1910 I first worked as a gardener’s assistant in the Berlin Botanical Garden and came to know this garden intimately, to sometime get a chance to lay out a new botanical garden in the way in which I think it should be layed out. Since then I have had opportunities to see and know many botanical gardens, but I have not seen one yet that even approached my ideal.

Letter from Henry Teuscher to Brother Marie-Victorin

April 14, 1932

We’ll take a leisurely stroll through the Montréal Botanical Garden and then head back to the Plateau area for lunch, thought the mister and I. But this garden refused to be dismissed so quickly.

The dreams of Brother Marie-Victorin and Henry Teuscher, the landscape architect-horticulturalist-botanist hired to design the garden in the 1930s, have germinated into a sprawling complex of almost 200 acres of themed gardens with 10 interconnected greenhouses stuffed to capacity. Towering groves of trees testify to its 80+ years.

The mister remarked the Botanical Garden seemed like a Noah’s Ark for plants, with virtually every species represented. Turns out, there are more than 22,000 species on the grounds. During high season, more than 450 employees, including horticulturists and botanists, work in the garden. While the park is removed from downtown and admission far from inexpensive, close to 1-million visitors wander the grounds annually.

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We saw only a fraction over the course of several hours, steering well clear of the Toxic Plants Garden (I’ve met poison ivy and oak on several occasions, thank you.) and deprived of touring the highly acclaimed First Nations Garden because of preparation for an upcoming exhibition. Fortunately, we were rewarded midway through with a café break – mine a fresh fig, goat cheese and pesto sandwich.

The random photos above represent only a small portion of our wanderings, and we are not what even remotely would be described as “plant people.” In fact, we have fewer than 20 pots on the balconies of our loft. Yet, the garden captivated my interest to such a large degree I actually have reserved some photos for another post or two….