Mural in Mexico

Now that I’ve completed a couple, I notice that every mural has a story. I guess it makes sense, so do most art pieces. And when these are on public spaces, take a while to complete, and end up involving the hands of others, there are a lot of interactions and stories that get woven around a bigger than life wall.

“Ixchel y sus Serpientes Lunares” is a 20 meter long by 5 meter high wall in the front of the house in Casa Pronoia, Quintana Roo, Mexico.

Behind it lives the Mayan jungle, the neighbour jaguar and the itty bitty spiders that tried to eat me alive. In front there lives the Caribbean Sea, its coastline with a beautiful reef inhabited by turtles and rays and strange colourful fish. 

As with most of my murals, I like to drink from the culture and mythology of the place when I come up with the design. 

Here, I painted Ixchel, a Maya deity venerated as the Goddess of the Moon, fertility, childbirth, pregnancy, medicine, rain, womanly crafts, and war. She was believed to have the ability to control the cycles of the moon as it passed through the sky. 

She represents fertility linked to the earth, the cycles of the moon governing the times of sowing and harvesting. As in many cultures, she personifies the duality of nature - a bountiful generous goddess of fertility and harvest, whilst also being punishing and sending floods and storms, causing severe damage. Ixchel has various representations depending on which cycle of the moon she is associated to, and is sometimes shown wearing a snake adorning her head and wrapped around her neck. 

The painting shows Ixchel, the smiling moon as seen in this part of the world, her hand expelling two snakes with moon cycles, slithering and connecting in the middle.

The plague of this paradisiac sea is the sargazo, an algae that is becoming an increasing problem in the coast. The use of fertilizant in crops goes into the water, and when it reaches the sea it fertilizes the sargazo, which grows more than it should and then dies on the coast, creating mountains of brown stinky residue. This is a clear warning from mother nature of the dangers of over farming and the death of our oceans. It was very present in the beach in front of us, and turning it into a beautiful plant on this wall was a way of elevating the ordinary and the unloved, and a reminder of the care we must take with our endangered environment.

At last, as a memory of the afternoons spent snorkelling and exploring the reef that follows the coastline, I painted a stingray and a turtle, hanging out with us humans, interacting as equals, an ode to the beautiful aquatic fauna seen in the reef, which I had the pleasure to observe while I was a guest in this place. I saw many weird fishes, and some majestic and strange rays, but didn’t manage to see a turtle. I’ll have to come back for that one.