Projects / Earthen Heart
Earthen Heart
Today, I still walk in circles on unfamiliar ground.
I seek to pass beneath, and sometimes above, if I carry less on my back.
I ask permission to enter, as the mountain tells me it has been home to many lives before mine.
Walking with an open heart I came back to the first house.
Its doors and walls were open.
Walking with an open heart I came across the mother house, the one that told me that there is nothing like returning to the land where you were born.
For 20 days I walked in circles over a land that did not seem to belong to me.
But with nostalgia, the house embraced me, joyfully welcoming me with gifts of forest, sunlit rain, and earthen walls.
I found a place to settle,
I promised to hold what was left of the house; that first house, open, without a roof and with a tree in the middle.
Empty, the house crumbles, falling into nostalgia.
With presence, it rises again.
But the earth knows no boundaries or possessions when you remember that home is the path back to the heart we all share—an earthen heart.
A forgotten earthen house, a relic of 150 years of humanity that, upon seeing it, I decided to love again.
The house had no roof, it was an open house.
The broken roof tiles were among the dense foliage I found as I explored it.
Walking and observing the great mountain I began to paint, to recover the care, the history, the support and the protection that for years the house had sheltered.
Paintings on clay tiles as an offering to what was left of the house.
Artwork details
Water Snake | Gouache on clay tile |15x13,5cm | 2024
Mountain Guardian | Gouache on clay tile |11,3x11cm | 2024
Midday Rain | Gouache on clay tile |12x10,5cm | 2024
Eucalyptus Forest | Gouache on clay tile |13x10cm | 2024
Night in Iguaque | Gouache on clay tile |13x9cm | 2024
Woodland Tangle | Gouache on clay tile |12x10,5cm | 2024
Earth of Color | Gouache on clay tile |9x13,5 cm | 2024
Mountain Forest | Gouache on clay tile |8x11,5cm | 2024
Pictograms of an open heart
The time I spent away from the house, I wandered through it, speaking with the locals. I collected colored soil and conversations, which later came together to shape the wall of the house, completing the circle of my days here.
A wall shapped with the generosity of the community.
It was the language, the symbol and the reciprocity of the territory, all together playing on the wall of the house.
Earthen hearts gathered in a circle re-inhabiting what had been forgotten, returning to the home, the earth, the mother.
Project created during Residencias Nara
Villa de Leyva, 2024