| Milagros imports ceramic
hand made Mexican wall tiles, hand blown glass, hand woven
bags, oil cloth flower and fruit bags, wood carvings, ceramic
pots, plastic basketry, niches, silver, amber, talavera,
dichroic jewellery, mirrors and much more. |
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Tel
/ Fax 020 7613 0876
Mobile: 07957 182140
Opening hours: Office Monday to Saturday 9am
to 6pm,
Shop Sunday 9am to 3 pm. |
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Milagros
- About Our Products |
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In
1990 Tom travelled in an old Saab from California
to Mexico. He was swept away by the beauty
of the county and the bold, colourful and
strange aesthetic qualities in their Art and
Craft. He abandoned a career in academia and
returned a year later to established Milagros.
Tom
has travelled extensively through Mexico and
has clocked thousand of miles. He has thorough
knowledge and understanding of the country
and the culture. He has an ability to find
the remotest villages, a good eye and fluent
Spanish. |
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Milagros
works with independent makers and small workshops
from Mexico to bring you beautiful and finely
finished hand crafted products. We have imported
goods from Mexico for 17 years and have consistently
worked with the same makers and workshops.
Milagros imports ceramic Mexican
wall tiles, mouth blown glass, hand woven
bags, oil cloth flower and fruit bags, wood
carvings, ceramic pots, plastic basketry,
niches, silver, amber, talavera, dichroic
jewellery, mirrors and much more.
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Mexico
is a vast and beautiful country. It straddles the
Americas like a bridge. Mexico rises steeply from
sea level to form the Alto Plano, it's highest point,
an extinct volcano Pico de Orizbo just outside Mexico
City, snow capped at 5610 meters. It is a high plateau,
which has been twisted, lifted and folded again
and again by geological forces and left thousands
of mountains. It has latitude similar to Mali. It
is the altitude that makes the summer bearable,
the evenings and mornings cool. It is a country
of deserts, volcanoes, green pine forests, two oceans
and one sea. It has the one percent of the worlds
land mass and 10% of the worlds flora and fauna,
crocodiles, whales, toucans, parrots, armadillos.
Mexico has kept
a strong identity and culture. It is the embodiment
of the familiar and unfamiliar the European and
the Indigenous American. It is both pre industrial
and post industrial. People have maintained a way
of life that would be familiar to those living 2000
years ago. Farming small plots of land with oxen,
keeping goats and hens and supplementing their income
with ceramics, weaving, carving.
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Why
buy an object made by hand when they can be
machine manufactured for less? There is something
in our post industrial psyche that makes us
long for a pre industrial past. Somehow encapsulated
within these objects it appears to exists
or be within reach.
The
objects are not made on the production line
but made and judged with the human hand and
eye. Their making is not hurried and rushed
but marks a gentler passing of time.
The objects
are not perfect. The glass often has bubbles
or marks where the tools where used to form
it. But beauty as determined by the Greeks
is imperfect.
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The pieces
often reflect the character of the individual
makers. A metaphorical handprint is left on the
object.
In
the Oaxacan villages where the woodcarving comes
from, some of the makers have transformed their
lives through carving. The ceramists have with
the help of the World Bank been able to make their
pottery with lead free glazes and expand their
market into the USA.
Some
of the potters will dig the clay themselves to
make ceramics. The carvers cut the wood to make
the wooden carving and the weavers grow the cotton
to make the bags. Artisans are frequently involved
in all parts of the making process.
Often
almost the whole village is involved in the production
of a particular craft item. Around lake Patzcuaro
craft communities established by the enlightend
Bishop Quiroga in the seventeenth century still
continue to make their designated craft.
Sometimes
a new tradition such as the wooden creatures form
Oaxaca or the ceramic figures from Ochmochi springs
up and sometimes it is a tradition that has been
past from generation to generation such as weaving
on a back strap loom or making burnished copper
pots.
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