Josefina Temin  Mexico

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Art is not a thing, it is a way (Leontyne Price)

The work of Josefina Temin brings us into intimate re-seeing of the natural world. She has invoked the craft, the unique perceptual capabilities and passionate attention of a master artist and stopped time. Her unique translations of seeds, leaves, and insects into a medium, and scale, that marvelously reveals the natural world’s mysterious – and constant- capacity to shapeshift, from form to form... This work catches a moment in that process and transmutes it into the medium of metal, its gleaming skin and tensile beauty, so that we can see the moment just before disappearance and transformation: we see what is just about to Become something else …just before it disappears in front of us!

Leaves fall, decay, and feed the earth, seeds open, and cotyledon leaves, the first tender green appear; we would be extraordinarily blessed to catch these brief, evanescent moments…an insect landing before us: wings fluttering, the complicated structure of its tiny self, quivering…and off…off it goes… before we can know its delicate way in the world.

Lucky we are; this artist fascinated by these forms, touched by these beings so formally exquisite, whom we may, in the pace and stresses of modern life, never notice, has caught them for us, the sensuous sheen and curves, even to replicating of the possibility of shiver and tremble….and it is a gift of craft and making: a seeing and honoring what might be missed, had the artist not done the work of rapturous capture…

Josefina Temin had long been renowned for her work as a paper artist; her work has been featured at many galleries and museums in New York City and her hometown of Mexico City. Temin visited an Artist Retreat in the countryside just outside San Miguel de Miguel to spend 3 months resting, refreshing her seeing, and looking, looking…deeply at the world. She walked the land: long walks in the early morning light, and something began to come forward in her seeing. The forms of the insects, their intricacy and lucid dynamic, and these she explored in her chosen medium, paper. When, later that year, she made the countryside Farm her home, she made the marvelous choice to ask, “What craft is San Miguel known for; anciently, what is made here? By the artisans?

Tin, hojalata was the answer, for hundreds of years: San Miguel craftspeople make beautiful objects, boxes, frames, lamps and lanterns, nichos, of tin. Temin found a Maestro, Jose Luz Badillo Dorantes, and became his apprentice. A special table, the tools, followed, 3 times weekly sessions learning the metals, mastering under his guidance, the tools: the possibilities and capabilities of the tin, and then, copper, cobre, and brass, latón.

And then she began an alchemical translation into this new material: seeds, scaled to engage us in their sensual shapes, made to catch water, now catch light. Spaces held open in their sleek and sensuous bodies for the Emergence of the New : the transformation that is their destiny. Insects, their nuances of quiver and tremble present in their wings. Leaves gathered, recreating for the viewer, the Bosque floor. Playing with scale, her work embraces the details and focuses us, pulls into the incipient sense of change, the just-about-to-be motion.

And then, what of the emotion caught? Pure joy!
The play of the shapeshifting light on the worked skins – the joy of one to whom Flight is a given, the leaves knowing themselves as neighbors: not a one…but a many – as if the sense of forest was innate in their form… Joy! As the Makers know it: play, and an alacrity: the craft of the BeautyMaker, wedded to deep seeing, and mastery…. A gift given back, to the Maestros of generations of men and women who held these same tools, the shears and the snips: so that we, may stand here, with her work…..and see the small world, so precious, so, both known and unknown, its mystery and glamour, offered, again, as gift, to us.

Judyth Hill, poet & provocateur Put a Spin on the Planet: Write!!