Our First Snowdrop Adventure

Just to give you the idea on how we search for our artwork around the world we want to share with you one of our first anecdotes.

We were in Mexico, in Guadalajara and one of our coworkers Maria Esperanza, who knows about our Snowdrop Project and our philosophy told us about pottery pieces made with one of the oldest techniques that has been present in all pre-Columbian cultures since its origins and it’s called Barro Bruñido. Barro means Mud and Bruñir is to Burnish in this case the action of burnishing a clay piece with a stone or pyrite. She told us that these artisans still work as their ancestors, they work in families and they start by making their own mud ……. so, after all, her story we wanted to see how these pieces were made and we asked her how we could do to go to one of these family workshops. Gently she organized for us a little stroll outside Guadalajara with Juan, an old friend that has a taxi and knows an artisan that works burnished clay pieces………  We were excited because this was our first Snowdrop adventure.

Almost at dawn an old blue Malibu stopped at the entry of our hotel and ask us if we were Maria Esperanza’s friends, he was Juan! We got into this blue old car – if I may say a little bit worried – and we began our way. As we approached a little village Juan told us that he has a Compadre who is an artisan, and he told us a little bit of his family. Finally, we stopped in front of a little humble house. Outside there was a man hitting the ground with a stick, it was Antonio, his Compadre, he was making a sort of flour from a pile of earth and nearby on the ground were what it seems a mother and her daughter, in fact, they were Guadalupe, his wife, and Margarita, his oldest daughter.  They were making a paste with this earth flour and some water, they were making the mud that we called clay.

Once the mix became clay we went inside the workshop with Antonio and Guadalupe, who started to work just with their hands, they started to make perfect round balls. We were captivated observing those two pairs of hands dancing between the clay and the container with water they had at hand and in the middle of this choreography perfect spheres were made, then with the help of an old ceramic tool they started to draw lines and flowers, basically they were designing them. While mother and father were submerged in their universe of spheres, Margarita arrives with different pots containing vegetable colors to ad to the balls, while they were drawing, she returned with a basket full of stones of different sizes and put it between them and change the water of the containers. Antonio and Guadalupe look at the stones examining them carefully, each one took the precise stone according to the surface to be worked and they begun to rub the ball with it. The more they rub the more burnished it gets, even the colors took another look, something between shine but old ……… to complete the experience among Antonio´s explanations about all this process and how he learned it from his grandfather an old radio was tuned in La Tapatia a local radio station that was playing a song of Los Sebastianes, off course we didn’t know it, it was Margarita who told us, when she gently brought us some coffee and told us that next week she would go to their concert at the local stadium, she was so excited …………..it was an unforgettable first experience, our starting point………Thanks Maria Esperanza!!