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Studio Tlahcuilos celeste contreras

Inspired by the ancients; book is where I focus myself as I celebrate this part of existence--where mind, hands and spirit meet to create something.

TRIVIA, theme: BOOKS

Name a time in history when burning a library to the ground would actually preserve the book?

"Nahuatl, also knowns as Aztec or Mexican, is the most widely spoken Indigenous language of North America." -- Fermin Herrera

"Before the period of Spanish contact, Nahuatl was written in an Indigenous pictographic script, which continued to be used well into the seventeenth century. Spanish priests and Nahuatl scribes began to record the Nahuatl language in the Spanish alphabet during the 1520s. A rich body of literature was collected and is found in hundreds of manuscripts that preserve the form of language as it was used several hundred years ago. In addition, sixteenth century Spanish priests in Mexico complied word lists and wrote grammatical treaties that described in these early works is called classical Nahuatl. It is the formal, literary style of the language." -- Fermin Herrera

Trivia Answer:

Mesopotamia Clay Tablets. Fire helped preserve these text.

"We must know something about the tlacuilos, who played such an important role in pre‐conquest Nahua society. Before the Spaniards arrived, Nahuas wrote texts in the form of various types of painted images, either on paper made from the bark of a tree or on stone edifices. The person who engaged in such writing was called a tlacuilo, a word that translates roughly as 'writer' or 'painter'. The Nahuas viewed this tlacuilo as a reflective artist, not as one who wrote down precisely what he saw. At the time of the Spanish conquest, the practices of the tlacuilos changed, as many became escribanos, who would write either Nahuatl or Spanish texts in the Roman alphabet. These scribes became intermediaries in the colonial project, and they overwhelmingly produced documents designed in some manner for the Spanish legal system. Moreover, the tlacuilos who continued to paint their images were influenced by European artistic conventions. Still, early tlacuilos were trained not only by friars but also by painters knowledgeable in pre‐conquest aesthetics. And the evidence from idolatry investigations, criminal trials and Inquisition cases shows that these artists continued to get their works into the hands of a wide variety of indigenous people.18 Too much current historical writing either ignores the role of the scribe or considers his work to be a window onto Nahua reality. I argue that the window is the wrong metaphor; his writings instead signify a prism."

-Pete Sigal, Imagining Cihuacoatl: Masculine Rituals, Nahua Goddesses and the Texts of the Tlacuilos Gender & History Masculine Rituals, Nahua Goddesses and the Texts of the Tlacuilos. Nov2010, Vol. 22 Issue 3, p538-563. 26p

digital drawing

Welcome to my studio: Room 343 Kenilworth Building, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Tlacuilo Book: We Are The Book Makers

Leather, paper, ink 8.75 x 5.68 x .625"

Alphabet Book

Paper, book board, ink 12.625" x 10.125" x .5"
wood and ink 3.81 x 4 x .75" & 5.5 x 5.375 x .75"

Ideation Card Book

Acrylic paint, colored pencil, frosted mylar, paper 8.5 x 11.93 x 6.25"

The Tlahcuilo

Broadside letterpress 8 x 10"

The Process

Bottom 2 images from, Avrin, Leila. Scribes, Script, and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Chicago: American Library Association; London: The British Library, 2010.

Exploring the ancient scribes, book makers I am interested in their materials, this includes handmade dip pens, scratching or carving tools, clay, papyrus(paper) and more. Here are some handmade dip pens I am creating out of found driftwood.

Playing with materials: this is a foam clay I am using. I roll out and then press into a relief surface. I am pressing into woodcuts, linoleum, stamps and my hand. Inspired by the ancient book tablets.

14cm x 14.5cm, stamped and pressed foam clay

Ancient books includes scrolls. Scrolls were held in vessels and with clay seals. This is my interpretation of a clay seal with Nahuatl logograms of 2 symbols that mean poetry, cuicatl (swirl or wind symbol meaning voice or words) and the xochitl(flower symbol) together they make tlahtolchihualiztli or xochitlahtolli, poetry. Now I am exploring Nahuatl/Aztec poetry, which dates back to the 1400s. Their poems would have most likely been oral, but I am also exploring when Nahuatl was translated in to Roman type face, 1520s. Because they poems were written down, most likely on papel amatl (amate paper pounded from tree bark).

28cm x 7.5 cm, foam clay, hand made paper(paper size 22cm x 28cm)

Recently I also explored a new binding technique. Not sure what is called yet, but I sewed it together using watercolor paper(thick about 140 lb weight). Used a woodcut print I made using oil based inks to cover the front and back boards. This might be a new book, with inked images or I might just use it for my notes, I have not decided yet.

16cm x 23cm x 3cm

Research Material

https://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php

𒍪

7cm x 6cm x 3cm, foam clay
carved wood blocks, 13.5cm x 14.75cm x 2cm

Power Paper: the Amate Manuscripts of Alfonso García Tellez

https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/in-circulation/2019/power-paper

Performance of Paper: Amate Paper process in San Pablito México.

In San Pablito, Puebla, Mexico, see how the local Otomi artisans that they work with, make this beautiful hand made paper.

Amate Paper – The Ancient Mexican Tradition

The tiny Mexican village of San Pablito has been making amate bark paper for centuries. When the Spanish banned the paper in Mexico because it was being used for magic and witchcraft, the remote town was one of the few places to preserve the traditional craft.

Material: Tapa

Thousands of years before the birth of Christ, different tribes wrapped themselves in cloth made from beaten tree bark. They removed the bark in vertical strips from the trees and scraped off the outer layer of bark. The inner bark or bast, which is much more flexible and durable than the outer bark, was soaked and washed. After that the women pounded the inner bark on a hard surface with a beater. The result was a piece of bark five times wider than it was originally.

These sheets of beaten bark were called ‘tapa’. There are numerous Indian tribes on the two American continents that produce tapa, primarily for clothing. This is also the case in Mexico. It appears from tree-bark beater finds in the central highlands, that tapa was being made as long ago as the Stone Age. Clothing made from beaten tree bark continued to be used after the introduction of cotton cloth. However, it is now the poor who wear barkcloth at religious festivals while the rich wear clothes made from textiles.

It is difficult to discover exactly how long bark material has been in use as a writing material. Especially as only a few manuscripts have survived from that period. What is clear is that there is only one other example in the world, namely Indonesia, of tapa being used as a writing material, which makes the Mexican example extremely unusual.

Amatl, Amate, Paper

Ficus

More Research

The Dresden Codex is a Mayan book, the oldest surviving book written in the Americas, dating to the 11th or 12th century. The codex was rediscovered in the city of Dresden, Germany, hence the book's present name. It is located in the museum of the Saxon State Library.

More Codices

THE CEREMONY OF BOOK

Temples = Libraries

Studios = Tool Workshop

Paper = Evidence of Ceremony

Ceremony = Replicating and enacting performance

Performance = Ceremony in Motion

Codice Citlalincue

click on image to enlarge

Amalia Mesa-Bains, b. Jul 10, 1943, California

Amalia Mesa-Bains, is a curator, author, visual artist, and educator. She is best known for her large-scale installations that reference home altars and ofrendas. Her work engages in a conceptual exploration of Mexican American women's spiritual practices that addresses colonial and imperial histories of display, the recovery of cultural memory, and their roles in identity formation. Among her many awards is a 1992 Distinguished MacArthur Fellowship. She is a former commissioner of arts for the city of San Francisco. Dr. Amalia Mesa-Bains was the director of the Department of Visual and Public Art for its first eight years at California State University Monterey Bay.

Let's Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk-uN8kbJkA&t=81s

Mesa-Bain's Installations and collections http://mesabains.com/

http://mesabains.com/
Digital collage, 2021

KOMIKKA PATTON

Komikka Patton is a 2D media artist based in New York City. She uses ballpoint pen, ink, paper, and assorted printmaking techniques to create works that are centrally based on the African Diasporan human condition. Her large paper installations and collages touch on futurism, transhumanism, mythology, and storytelling.

http://komikkatheseed.com/gatekeepers-2020

Question: what if these were the size of a wall? cut in large sheets of paper? Handmade paper? Metal?

Delilah Montoya, b.December 10, 1955, Texas

Delilah Montoya is a contemporary artist and educator who was born in Fort Worth, Texas and was raised in Omaha, Nebraska by her Anglo-American father and Latina mother. She earned her BA, MA and MFA from the University of New Mexico. Presently a professor at the University of Houston.

Codex Contreras I & II, 2019

Montoya's Installations and Altars

http://www.delilahmontoya.com/installation/Sebastiana_Installs/index.html

More Illustrations :

Digital Drawing, 2021
Digital Drawing, 2021

RESEARCH:

The Florentine Codice

Florentine Codex: General history of the things of New Spain

A team of Franciscan Friar including Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590) and 20+ Tlacuiloque created this book over 30 years. There are 12 books in the Florentine Codice

I n T L i l i I n T L a p a l l i

Black Ink -- The Color

Starting to grow in the PaperMakers Farm, 3rd floor of Kenilworth