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Mud Mural at Colorado State University Pueblo, with Kiko Denzer

May 21, 2012

Getting mud to stick on the wall

Maya Aviña teaches fine arts at CSU in Pueblo, Colorado. For about the past ten years, she’s been immersed in natural building, which she has also made into the focus of her research at the college. Last year, she invited me to come be an “artist in residence” and do a mural project. The challenge was to bring life into dead space: a bleak, harsh, hard-edged, institutional (college) courtyard of grey and yellow concrete pressed down by massive, overhanging soffit walls of more cast concrete. It looked (and felt) like a pen in a zoo designed so the animals below couldn’t hide from viewers on the high, overhanging walls. In two days, however, a group of about a dozen of us made designs, mixed up a bunch of mud, and transformed the space. Below is my account, with photos, magazine format. And here’s a link to Maya’s website, which has more photos, particular details of the process, and a video.

Open publication – Free publishing – More cob art

 

1 Comment · Kiko's gallery, stories: building, earth, arts, the work of art

Comments

  1. Laura says

    April 7, 2013 at 7:07 am

    A beautiful and inspiring story, thank you for writing. So wanting to get my hands dirty, do have an oven build in my future to look forward to. Virginia dirt.

    Reply

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from the publisher

Hand Print Press began in the early 90s, when I self-published Build Your Own Earth Oven. I was thinking of myself as a capital A  Artist. However, as I learned from the garden and other teachers, art just means “to fit together” — it’s how the world works — flora, fauna, humans — all must fit themselves together, with each other, with the landscape, with wind and weather. In addition to the bookstore (which now includes a few other authors), the site contains stories and updates on ovens, heat, baking, beauty, agriculture, fire, community, culture, (spoon) carving, etc. It’s all art! Thanks for visiting. You can contact me at handprint at cmug dot com, or thru instagram.
— Kiko Denzer

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