Autor: Maxim Zaragoza

Maxim nació en Tokio en 1993. Ahora vive en México en una casa con un jardín muy bien cuidado. Está acabando sus estudios en Comunicación y Periodismo. Por el momento escribe, hace música, poemas, chistes y documentales. Lo que más le gusta es hacer perfiles. Curiosa, pues. Escribe canciones y cuentos para niños, algunos los ilustra. Siempre interesada en asuntos de interculturalidad y derechos humanos. De repente toma fotos muy bonitas, otras veces no. No maneja bien pero hace muy buenos jugos.

Zoom is where I live now.

I embroidered a rectangle on craft paper the size of the Zoom space I occupy on my laptop screen. I cut out a cardboard needle and used black, cotton thread as a nod to the physicality of my practice. Lately, I have felt that rectangle is the only place where I get to exist in the collective.

My house and its jacaranda tree

This is the blueprint of my house I embroidered (front and back). It was hard to flatten without an iron. In my embroidery sessions with Antonia, she said that «the testimony of one’s life is a political act».

An embroidered map of my house and its jacaranda tree

These are: a sketch I made of the layout of my house in Mexico, the back of the embroidery, the front (before adding the tree and vines, and a photo of today’s embroidery session with Antonia.

I had explored various ways to represent my house in Mexico and its jacaranda tree. I went back to this google satellite view and wanted to recreate it in embroidery. I used four different stitches that Amanda taught me, a light beige thread for the areas inside my house, a light grey for the staircases and walls that I share with neighbours. The purple dots mimic the way this particular tree looks like from an aerial perspective in the fornt of my house, as well as my solanum wendlandii vine in my back patio. I am really happy with the result. This is a short video of the embroidery I took in front of the grass at Gray’s, where I made it:

Tomatillo, a revision

These are scans of a new illustration I made for one of the stories I wrote for «Little Stories of Little Griefs». I revised the previous one and thought this would suit the story more. It’s about tomatillo (or green tomatoes), and how I wish I had a suitcase to carry my tomatillo garden from Mexico.

I played around with the hair color, but it felt weird to not have my hair black. Tomatillos and black hair are very essential to my identity. I also played around with the idea of the tomatillo. I liked drawing the cut tomatillo, but what I like most about it is the paper like casing that holds it, so I went with that.

These are scans of the new illustration I made for a text about tomatillos after re assessing the one I had previously done.

We’ll bloom next year

This is a youtube channel about a bonsai sensei and his student. They discuss trees and their behaviours in a small, contained scale, which makes it easy to read into metaphorically and find parallels to human behaviour. This particular video is about the azalea bonsais that didn’t bloom this year. Satsuki means azalea in Japanese, which also happens to be my middle name.

Needles

Today I began the embroidery workshop with Antonia, and we discussed embroidery as a political act through the resignification of its practice, and will develop a creative stitch sampler. I explored the idea of what embroidery would look like within my practice and made a paper needle and canvas:

Things to do:

After talking with Annette today via Zoom, she recommended the following:

  1. That I share more of the development of ideas and refine them.
  2. That I revise my illustrations for the texts I’ve written.
  3. That I think of the communication of the illustrations with a more critical eye, that I imagine being like an art director.
  4. That I try stenciling to explore other uses of negative and positive space.
  5. That I record my embroidery sessions with Antonia González Alarcón.
  6. That I focus the basis of my dissertation more on my practice and contextualize my work with other writer/illustrators’.
  7. That I show on what basis I’ve made a decision along the process of creating collages.
  8. That in this documenting I include: the materials, continuity and experimentation.
  9. That I don’t over-edit the blog.
  10. That I test the narrative of the illustrations/texts to have more control of what the viewer is reading.
  11. That I digitize other drawings or sketches I’ve made, even if they’re bad.
  12. That I experiment with aerial and other perspectives in my illustrations.
  13. That I look for agents and publishers in the UK and The Netherlands andfind them by researchign other illustrator/writers. (Tate Publishing, Walker Books and Hobart Press).
  14. That I repeat multiple times the last collage I made.

Visual Proposal.2

I had originally thought about creating an ebook with the «Little Stories of Little Griefs», but after talking to Jon, thought maybe it would be worth keeping the blog format, because the ebook and my idea of using Paperturn, would make everything considerably flat.

These are options for that.

The image above is how I imagined a website with these stories: «Little Stories of Grief» in the middle of the page, the collages I’ve made around it, then the written stories around that, like a mind map on craft paper and the images and texts linked with red stitching. After voicing concern about my lack of programming knowledge, Annette recommended I produce this as a mock up for what I envisioned for a website.

Another option was to create another blog. I looked at Squarespace templates and though this one would suit my illustration style and general concept of the compilation of these stories very well: Squarespace template.