On Saturday, I went with four other Bread Loafers up to Questa, NM, just north of Taos to do some mudding. Many of the old New Mexico town in the area have Catholic sanctuaries dating back hundreds of years. Many of these churches are adobe, and they require quite a bit of work to maintain. You can see the adobe bricks showing through on the bell towers of the church in the picture on the left.
Antonio from a non-profit group called Cornerstones, came to meet us in Questa on Saturday morning, so that we could help with the maintenance work. He knew so much about adobe it was amazing.
The walls of St. Anthony's church where we worked are 50 inches thick. The outsides will wear down over time with weathering, and so we were there to repair by putting on a fresh coat of adobe plaster over the bricks. In generations past, the women of the community would come out about once a year to do this work, but that is no longer the case. In the case of Questa there doesn't seem to be much community support to keep repairs up, so I don't know what will become of their little church. Antonio says there are major problems with the structure, but unless people will come out to take care of it, not much can be done.
We literally slung a mud plaster mixture of grass, dirt, water and gravel at the wall and then did some smoothing over with the trowel. There really was no wrong way of doing it, so it wasn't very high stress.
We did get dirty, though. I had mud splatters all over the front of me, on my face, and in my hair. I tried taking a self-portrait, but it didn't come out too well.
Here is part of the end result.
1 comment:
This looks like quite an experience, Em. Aside from the mud part, it's interesting to imagine what it must have been like... And, in a sense, sad to see an ending to so many of these cultural traditions.
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