In July last year, at an artists’ gathering in Galicia, I met the Mexican artist Elizabeth Ross. In conversation I discovered that she had visited Wales and in fact had more than a passing interest in Welsh culture. It was surprising to find this in someone from such a seemingly unrelated background and I suggested that she visit the Eisteddfod that August. During her stay I became more acquainted with her work and ideas.

 Not long ago the native roots of my people were something to hide and even be ashamed of. Being Mexican was a blurred identity.

 Despite the diverse forms that contemporary art takes, there is still in the West a suspicion of art which comes from other, unfamiliar contexts, and a low tolerance for art which does not conform to a certain urbanised sophistication. Not unrelated to this, there is also a suspicion of faux-Celticism which makes suspect even a serious effort to look to ancient cultural roots and comparative mythologies as relevant source material for contemporary art.

 Moreover, certain expectations are invoked when looking at art from a culture which is as defined in our minds — inaccurately, no doubt — as Mexico’s. I introduced myself to Ross by saying that I admired the work of Francisco Toledo, and I sensed she was relieved that I hadn’t brought up the famously iconic Frida Kahlo. Toledo, along with Kahlo, draws his iconography from the specifics of his indigenous culture, and I suppose that, for me, a Mexican artist who doesn’t do this is less of an artist. That may be an unfair expectation but it did not take me long to sense a kinship with Ross in our thinking, and a shared appreciation of artists like Ana Mendieta and José Bedia from Cuba. She is highly aware of current trends in art but is also politicised — “cultured” from the 1968 generation as she puts it — and involved in the politics of feminism, environmentalism and cultural identity. At the core of all this is an art and a philosophy deeply influenced by Mexico’s indigenous belief systems. Like Mendieta and Bedia, Ross draws inspiration from those beliefs, and in doing so proves that the past also exists or co-exists in the present. However, unlike Mendieta and Bedia who left their homeland through choice or circumstance, Ross is active in the promotion of culture in Mexico as well as exhibiting in Europe and the USA.

Her friend, the late Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, in his book México Profundo, Reclaiming a Civilisation argues that the remaining Indian communities, the “de-Indianised” rural mestizos and vast sectors of the urban poor constitute the “México profundo” of his title. Their lives and ways of understanding the world, he suggests, continue to be rooted in Mesoamerican civilisation; an ancient agricultural complex provides their food supply, and work is understood as a way of maintaining a harmonious relationship with the natural world; health is related to human conduct, and community service is often a part of each individual’s obligation to his community. Since the Conquest, Bonfil claims, an “imaginary Mexico”, imposed by the West, has dominated the peoples of the México profundo. It is imaginary not necessarily because it does not exist, but because it denies the cultural reality of most Mexicans’ lives. Within the México profundo there exists an enormous body of accumulated knowledge, which includes successful patterns for living together and adapting to the natural world. To face the future successfully, Bonfil argues, Mexico must build on the strengths of this Mesoamerican civilisation.

It is in Elizabeth Ross’s ceramic work and ritual actions that the influence of these ideas seems most clearly defined. As Mark Morris, brother of the poet Twm Morys, wrote in a catalogue of Ross’s exhibition in Banff, Canada in 1999:

 In Elizabeth’s ceramics... we are in the realm of memory — individual memory, but more important, collective memory, the memory of the collective unconscious. There is no Postmodern-ism here, no form that requires a ruler-straight edge or set square. Instead we have rock and stone, wind and weathering, ancient rune script and arcane symbol, all in the clay that is the clay of the Chiapas Mayan.  

It is the journey from the past, the journey into the future, but also the journey into the subconscious where the things of the past have continued to dwell in our being.

 While this is pertinent to the works in the catalogue, it overlooks the fact that Ross is also highly attuned to contemporary art practice — the use of photographic and digital media, for example, and the possibilities inherent in the web and performative street-level art, in politics and “actions” — as well as being familiar with Postmodern concerns with identity. Moreover, while maintaining links to her Nahuatl ancestry from her mother’s side, she is also very much in tune with the Asturian Spanish inheritance of her father, through which there eventually developed an affinity with the Celts.

The Zapatista movement in Mexico reflects a similar concern with memory and tradition combined with political activism and familiarity with economic and politic theory. In this sense, Elizabeth Ross’s ceramic work fits into a recognisable pattern in contemporary Mexican culture. At one level, the ceramics can be seen as sculptures which draw on mythical and magical readings of the past. They might also be taken almost as anthropological artefacts collected by a museum to be reinterpreted and re-contextualised by a contemporary audience. There are arrowheads with symbols of conjoined male and female figures; boats and menhirs, armies of simplified figures which take their shape partly from the corncob and partly from the phallus which it resembles; hands, and handprints, manos de bruja (the witches’ hands). There are also associations of maize with the female — imprints of corn cobs on casts of the artist’s own torso — as a direct way of expressing the fact that Mexico’s history and identity are entwined with this cereal:

In the Mayan sacred book, the Popol Vuh, the gods created people out of cornmeal. The “people of corn” flourished, building one of the most remarkable cultures in human history.

 Maize also plays a part in what she calls her “ritual action” in which grain is offered or “sown” wherever she goes. From visits to Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Galicia, from Barcelona to Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, this ritual is part of a work broken into component “verses”. It points to the contemporary nature of her work, although there is a subtle difference in intention between her performances and what we usually understand by “live art”. Ross defines her work as “ritual art” explaining that;

 The artist Emma Lawton has also talked with her about comparative ideas of shamanism in Europe  and Mexico and parallels with another project Ross has been planning. Ross explains how making figurines in clay allows abused women to regain their self-esteem, and almost to “pass on” their bad experiences into the clay. Her response to my suggestion that this might be art therapy was: “Art as therapy? No, not here, as they are not doing art, they are learning how to express themselves with clay.”

The use of clay, that most basic and elemental of materials is significant, as is the 'folk' nature of the artist's ritual actions. Both share the Zapatista's elevation of peasant and indigenous culture above the corrupted materialism of globalisation.

 Living in Mexico it would be impossible not be aware of the detrimental effects of globalisation, of hegemonic cultural and economic forces, of the effects of cheap labour and mass migration. The Zapatista Liberation Army was born out of the injustice suffered by Mexicans, especially the indigenous Indian communities. The Zapatistas invoke the “Tierra y Libertad!” warcry of Emiliano Zapata, and are in the process of a popular rebellion against the Mexican government and US domination. They oppose the disastrous North American Free Trade Agreement, which in effect sanctions unregulated entrepreneurial capitalism and created the maquila factories.

There is also the threat to native maize production as a result of GMS grain imported from US agri-chemical companies. Since corn is considered sacred this is akin to the injection of a deadly virus into the Mayan soul. The offering of corn in Ross’s ritual action takes on an added poignancy and meaning in this context. She wrote the following to accompany a ritual action held on 12 October in Morelia, Mexico:

I really do believe art and mysticism/spiritualism/alchemy etc produce very similar effects in humanity, both in the artist and the viewer. I really believe there is a spiritual dimension that can’t be ignored in art.

 To an audience more used to the ironic or dramatic art performance, Ross’s acción may seem more like a folk dance. There is a purity and honesty about it, a graceful thanksgiving and offering which moves beyond the remit of most live art performances. Such work raises issues about the polarisation in our own culture of sophistication and primitivism, folk art and high art, and about intentionality. Ross attempts to retain the spontaneity of invention within a frame of reference which remains true to the meaning and intent of tradition and ritual. Her art is neither pastiche nor ironic comment, for her artworks and actions express the spirit of the tradition while at the same time allowing Ross to comment on current cultural, political and ecological issues.

Her exhibition in Banff in Canada was dominated by a two-metre-high standing ceramic piece, Reunion (1999), which, while being a sculpture in the accepted sense, also transcends any simple definition. It is a presence which appears to be on the verge of animated life, standing like a malleable megalith, slowly mutating to reveal its essence — a uniform base, diverging into a duality, two birds, two lovers perhaps, who are finally reunited. The sculpture makes us see “reunion” in its true sense — a coming together of something which had become inexplicably divided, it is a return to source, a return home.

Much of Ross’s work reminds me of poetry (which she also writes) and especially of Welsh poetry. In both there is a sense of living in two worlds, one a hidden, almost submerged culture, out of the fusion of which a new understanding begins to emerge. This other, deeper world, emerges in Ross’s work in ways which have a resonance for us in Wales. One particularly beautiful boat made from paper clay, for example, is a sister ship to a miniature first-century BC golden Celtic boat found in Ireland. The boat image crops up often in Ross’s work with the words navegar es preciso (voyaging is a necessity). This repetitive use of archetypal forms — the boat, the standing stone, the spiral — and their association with words and poetic phrases which have an incantatory quality, takes these works beyond the merely visual.

Other forms, like the Elementales (1999), are small pieces of formed clay squeezed in the artist’s hand. Similar pieces are hung on string, assembled into spirals, or spill out of a basket. They are like the remains of some creature which still exudes a strong sense of its presence, like dinosaur bones, or they evoke runes used for divination by a shaman. They are also, of course, traces of the artist’s own presence.

 In this respect, Ross refers to herself as a “witch”, and it is clear that, for her, it is a term which has political, feminist and artistic connotations as much as any reference to the casting of spells. Indeed, using the term at all is a political, feminist act of reclamation, suggesting the outsider status of the woman artist in human culture, as well as the practice of making art as a “charm” for society. As Ross says:

To use imagination is to use magic, with it we create the world once and again. To use imagination is to wake up. Yes, another world, a different world, is possible!

In this context she emphasises that magic and ritual are real elements in Mexican life, not just in rural areas but at the highest level — “even the presidents have their personal witch” — and that this is more than a gesture towards tradition.

This syncretism is reflected in her art, but while there is a diversity of influence in Ross’s work and a multi-media approach, there is also a distinct desire for simplicity and directness. Paradoxically this makes the work harder for a European art audience, with its sophisticated tastes, to understand and it may explain why there is some resistance to it in high art circles. For Ross’s art attempts to give meaning to life, as opposed to being a diversion from it. Moreover, the philosophy behind it is only “simple” if one accepts its thesis, that art is essential to life and not mere decoration.

By simplicity, Ross means simplicity of form and execution, but also simplicity of expression which belies the density of cultural reference. She also decided to avoid being classed as a ceramicist, with all the technical specialisation which this implies, paring down unnecessary technical accomplishment in order to communicate directly. Creating an inclusive, rather than exclusive gallery-culture art, she lets an audience into her world on several levels.

 Born in Mexico City, Ross now lives inVistabella in the hills of Michoacán* and it was to the nearby city of Morelia that she invited six artist (two from Wales, Reiko Aoyagi and Andrew Smith) to participate in the “Identities” encounter. For three weeks in January 2004 these artists made work, held workshops and engaged with the local culture, exhibiting what they had created at the end of their stay. Another five Welsh artists are invited to the second Identities Encounter in May this year. The aim of these encounters is to increase sympathetic, artist-led collaborative contacts, and to enhance the networking of art regions that are outside “recognised” centres of art production. In the same spirit, on her latest visit to Europe in 2004 she formed new links and exhibited her own work, often in an impromptu manner. In Wales, for example, she exhibited a large photographic print on the Eisteddfod field inside Carwyn Evans’s Cywaith Cymru-commissioned art structure. She gave presentations of a CD Rom detailing Identidades 2004 at Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre and at the University of Wales, Bangor. She has also formed close connections with the Harlech Biennale (and will participate in the 2005 Biennale in September) as well as with many artistic communities in Wales from the Chapel of Art in Cricieth to Chapter Art Centre, Cardiff.

I am Mexican. My lineage includes Nahuatl blood from my mother’s side but also l am nurtured by some other. I am mestiza. I live in the twenty-first century, but the indigenous root and maiz, earth and the word, live in me and give me strength. Our flesh is made out of maiz. In 2004, maiz and identity are in danger. In this ritual action I try to invoke the divine maiz and the ancestral knowledge with words said in Nahuatl: maka aik nimiki, maka aik nipolihui, so it won’t perish. I use an original Capacuaro outfit, a precious gift from three young Purepecha women, and so I honour them and in them, all the indigenous women.

 Many Mexicans may feel a certain unease at being caught between conflicting heritages — the colonial Spanish Criollo, the indigenous Indian, and the Mestizo. Such factors shape an artist, however, contributing to an understanding and empathy with similar cultures at the margins, even those like that of Wales which is relatively comfortable within a European context, though nonetheless under threat. The focus of Ross’s art, fusing as it does, the contemporary with a consciousness of parallel and historical cultures, is a testament to continuity in a fractured world, and a direct challenge to the pervasive monoculture of globalisation

Elizabeth Ross devotes her considerable energies to writing, lecturing and organising, as well as exhibiting and performing, earning in the process an irregular income from journalism. In 1994 she launched a cultural magazine Vientos (Winds) which has since been republished in book form, and is currently editing The Dark Goddess, Mythology and Sex. As a journalist she writes on art, mythology, poetry and politics.

 In the words of Cuban artist Raquelin Mendieta, “Art and Spirituality are one and the same. Works of Art are prayers on the Altar of Life.” Coming to know Elizabeth Ross and her work has helped me to understand that statement a little better. Perhaps we get the art we deserve, most of it ephemeral stuff for the throwaway world we have made. In places where other values exist, and Wales could be one of those places, perhaps we should consider more seriously that another, better world, is possible — to borrow a Zapatista phrase, “A world where the many worlds fit.”

Caerdydd, Cymru,  2005

Passion, -and a thirst for essence- to find a way to express outwardly in her work what is felt inside...

  In the brief time l have known Elizabeth Ross, these are the qualities that reveal themselves most immediately to me, both in person and in her work, She is someone who takes living seriously, who wants to get the most of her time in this world -someone for whom art-making, most particularly with clay this far, but with increasingly broad parameters, is perhaps the most logical and rewarding way to pursue this passion.

 Elizabeth has a direct, visceral relationship with clay, a great respect for its possibilities as a vehicle of expression. It is not only of earth, it is earth. This is of major importance for her because by its very character as a material, clay is naturally designed to receive the touch of the maker,  record it throughout the process of creation and remember it when that process is complete. The maker's signature is there, visible in the form and surface of the material for all to see, in the presence of the work.

 While Elizabeth was a resident artist here at the Banff Centre for the Arts in the summer of 1999, l was struck by her intensity and her passion. Her time here seemed to embody a personal journey. It was a perod of exploration, of going further along thematic pathways already stablished as well as charting new territories in her own personal and artistic vocabulary. A time of questioning asn assimilation. A time for emphatic statement -l am here and l want you to know me.

The work she did in Banff culminated inan exhibition comprised of two major elements: a big monolithic clay structure called Reunion and an installation entitled Translated, which gave physical form to some of the concepts and conclusions about self-awareness and identity which interests Elizabeth. Her thoughts, ideas and values were all present in the spiral of porcelain bones and arches on the floor .one artist's three-dimensional document of the journey we are all in our lives, in one way or another. It was also an invitation to the viewer to share in these thoughts and observations, to find one's own symbols to relate to in her work -to find a common ground.

 To me, Elizabeth's work is nor so much about being art as it is about being human, about using her creative process to engage those questions that elude specific answers. Who are we? What is important to us? How do we find the means to communicate with each other? How can we share our experience of the world around us, our feelings about life -our passion?

 It seems a worthy journey...

The Banff Centre for the Arts

December 1999

A Celtic Standing Stone looming out of the mist in an Irish bog, a Mayan temple rising out of a Central American tropical forest. They seem to belong to different worlds, different eras, totally different traditions and concepts of the universe. But these, the Celtic and the Prehispanic, are the two sources that flow through Elizabeth Ross’ work, that she has brought together into a single ceramic unity.

Are the two civilizations so remote from each other as they seem? Certainly their surface sociology is utterly different, but underneath, as Lewis Spence pointed out some 50 years ago1 , there are strong similarities. Both rise stone from the earth and are rooted in those two elements. Both had a sun god and a moon god as central to their conceptions, that fused duality that recurs in Elizabeth’s work. Both had sophisticated astronomical knowledge and the technological means - stone based - that predict and interpret. Both had a concept of a Divine King and of a magical priestly caste. The rabbit was sacred to the prehispanics, the hare to the Celts, birds to both. Both, incidentally, practiced human sacrifice. And both, in spite of Christianity’s attempts to stamp them out over 1500 years on the one hand and 500 years on the other, have a sense of the arcane, or the spirit world, which has somehow managed - just - to survive.

Many of us have one or the other of those traditions in our blood - or, indeed, both. And even if we don’t, we have the vestige of some other tradition that probably was not too dissimilar. DiAna, part of The Forest in Elizabeth’s Road of Memory is Diana the Huntress, the Goddess of the Moon, but also Dana, the Celtic Moon Goddess, and Ixchel, the Mayan Moon deity.

The glass underlying Arrows of Diana is the glass into the lower regions, the subconscious, from which the rocks of earth emerge, but also the Celtic glass of the Glass Castle where the dead heroes live. The Power wand could come from a portal at Woodhenge, the Cretan Labyrinth, or a ceremony at Labná. And in her 1999 installation at The Banff Centre, the Celtic and the prehispanic came together in a road of bones around a series of arches in the shape of a Celtic stone circle.

In Elizabeth’s ceramics, therefore, we are in the realm of memory - individual memory, but, more important, collective memory, the memory of the collective unconscious. There is no post-Modernism here, no form that requires a ruler-straight edge or set-square. Instead we have rock and stone, wind and weathering, ancient rune script and arcane symbol, all in the clay that is the clay of the Chiapas Mayan.

Nor is it surprising that the theme of the journey so often recurs in her work. It is the journey from the past, the journey into the future, but also the journey into the subconscious where these things of the past have continued to dwell in our being. Are they important? I believe so - the more our conscious world becomes surrounded by artificial, and indeed virtual, things, the more we need to be reminded of the source of the earth, of that spirit world - or at least that spiritual plane - to keep humanity in balance. Anyone who has stood before a Celtic stone circle or a Toltec ruin knows of the sense of power and spiritualness that is released, without in any way being able to identify what or why it is. Elizabeth Ross’ sculptures revive that sense, on a local scale. To look on them is a doorway into another journey, one we all need to make from time to time.

Mark Morris

Wetaskiwin, Alberta

...L'exposition du Centre culturel mexicain à Paris réunit l'oeuvre de 16 artistes de premier plan...  D'une constructivisme tout particulier son les réalisations de Vicente Rojo et  d'Elizabeth Ross. 

Elizabeth Ross, intéresée elle aussi par l'ecologie, cherche à déveloper un art lié a la nature. Ses Cinq Coins possèdent une

force intrinsèque énorme, qui lui permet de faire surgir un espace gigantesque d'une surface minimale. Le tour de force est d'autant plus grande que l'artiste invite le spectateur à multiplier et à renouveler cet espace, le mettant en relation d'une manière peu courante avec l'oeuvre d'art. Chaque pièce est gigantesque par la force qu'elle irradie.

The eyes, human body's most transparent part, is the meeting point between light and color and their inner equivalent, as Aristoteles stated. That thought is intrinsically related with Zen philosophy, wich considers gaze as knowledge mean and object.

Eliabeth Ross is an artist who nurtures from western and esatern sources. Both canons are translated in her work. Her sculptures, made often with clay, are rigorous with the western sculpture composition rules but their essence comes deom a spiral perception journey, in the way of Zen, in which we will never find straight lines but just a spiral forming upon itself.

Ross' formal discourse is demanding. It is the link between void and gaze. That passionate exploration has enrichened her sculptures, constructed with volumes and tensions related to organic abstraction.

An inherent particularity of Ross' language oinduces the observer to compenetrate with the vital breath that flows from each piece, and to dice into its full void to percieve its beautiful and complex simplicity, which frequently suggests that her visual enigmas, shaped in small and medium formats, are the recreation of an inner landscape patiently structured as a refrection of nature. Contemplation. Void and gaze: spiral. profound meditation. Humanity and nature: spiral.

Different dualities cross the ceramics works of Elizabeth Ross. One of them is the conception on Nature as a

 mother that makes life possible while regenerates herself each time she's fed with the dead bodies. The thought that the beginning of the last journey is more the ending of the first passage. The interdependence between the human and the divine. The marks of the animated over the unanimated, the relationship between mesoamerican and Western thoughts. the bonds of Earth and Cosmos. Life's progression and the obstacles threatening it. Or the existence of one and multiple centres or axis of the same world.

The subjects she attacks are ancient ones. But before those recurrent matters of humankind, she proceeds in an according way with the spirit of our time: instead of assuming the multiplicity of approaches for explaining dualities as incontrovertible matters (and without sheltering in the passivity of posmodern uncertainty),

she feels impelled to propose unheard solutions for the same subjects. Furthermore, she doesn't disdain the accumulation of already known explanations but, as a demiurge, acts in a ritual manner and she herself gives form to the primordial unshaped mass.

Given the coherence between her interests and the way she attacks them, Elizabeth Ross obtains results charged with a strong expressivity, which are eloquent. Which concern to sensibility and invite the publics to refresh their memory. The present profit for reconsidering our past is emphasized by the productive processes she uses. That is the reason for a salt kiln, burnishing, or even omit the firing. This, simultaneously with the desire of expanding the borders of ceramics sculpture, is present in her work. That is why she rather makes settings, assembling and installations. In this artist's production, then, the arcane is updated. the ancient results standing.