The Magic Carpets of Oaxaca...

Oaxaca is a very special place - the heart and soul of Mexico - its ancestral, spiritual and cultural home. It is a place where all the traditions of Mexico are followed and the festivities of Mexico are celebrated, and when this is combined with Oaxaca as the city of artists and folk art, then this is the result - the Day of the Dead tapetes monumentales (giant carpets).....

Oaxaca is a wonderful place to witness all the amazing Day of the Dead celebrations, and central to those celebrations is all the folk art associated with the festival. In front of the cathedral this bicentennial year, there was an exhibition of five giant sand paintings to honour the dead , and I was lucky to see the process of constructing these contoured carpets from start to finish...

First the sand is poured into the frame, kept moist with watering cans so it can be easily moulded, and then gradually shaped by hand into the contours of skulls, skeletons, snakes, and bones. Initially the site looks like some kind of strange archaeological dig in reverse with bones being created instead of uncovered....

Powdered paints are applied to the contoured shapes in strict colour order - first white to literally create the skeletal framework of the images, then the primary colours reds, yellows, and blues, followed by the pastel colours pinks, lemons and lilacs....

The colours are applied by sifting powdered paints through an ordinary household sieve, and the last colour to be added is always black....

Special attention is always paid to getting the details just right, especially the eye sockets and the teeth of the skulls....

Then the final touches are added, a few extra sprinkles from the sieve, getting all the tiny little details in place....

Then it is time to step back and admire the fruits of such artistic labour - six solid hours of hard labour - with these wonderful final results....

I felt so privileged to witness this extraordinary process from start to finish, and hope you enjoy this sequence of photographs which documents the different stages involved. For more windows on the world this week check out the My World Tuesday postings by clicking here....