español

About

Tlamanalli is a nahuatl word meaning offering.

Nahuatl is the second largest spoken language in Mexico, after spanish , and it is the mother language of about 1 million people.

My name is David Cañedo, born in Mexico city in 1961.

I have been doing arts and crafts for about 15 years, since 1987. I discovered I had a certain disposition for woodcarving when I was traveling around the world and I happened to stay for a few months at a Melquite monastery in the outskirts of Jerusalem, where I was the apprentice of one of the monks who had his atelier where he made beautiful carved crosses. I learnt a lot from him, and later, when I came back to Mexico I continued learning crafts. I attended for a number of years a couple of very good arts and crafts schools in Mexico city and gradually moved out of woodcarving (though I still enjoy trying my hand at it from time to time), and began exploring other techniques, including pottery, stained glass, inlaid, jewelry and then enameling. This one I fell in love with right from the start.

Another big breakthrough came to me when I discovered sundials. It was also almost by chance. I was traveling again by bicycle in the south of France, this was in 1992, on my way to Santiago de Compostela, and I had a flat tire and had to stop overnight in this small town in the Pyrenees, I don’t even remember its name, and there was this shop where they had hundreds of sundials in exhibition, of all kinds, sizes and styles, and it was like a revelation. I was astonished, bedazzled, like when you discover a whole new world that you didn’t even know that it existed. I decided that I had to learn how to make them. Not only that, I had to become an expert. The actual process of learning wasn’t so difficult; I have always had an affinity with mathematics, and I have also always been an amateur of astronomy. I guess that what attracted me the most towards sundials was that somehow they appealed to both my intellectual side, with all their calculations and preciseness, and to my artistic side, being that sundials allow for a great freedom in the choice of materials and in the expression of creativity.

Instead of boring you with a list of individual or collective exhibitions in which I have participated or the works that I have placed here and there and all that nonsense, I will tell you about the things I am most proud of. I think that the day when I die the things I will be most fond of is the travels that I have done, and particularly my trips by bicycle. Ever since I was a kid I liked my bicycle, and later, when I discovered how fun it was to travel with it I just kept doing it again and again.

Between 1986 and 1988 I rode about 20,000 kilometers in Europe and the middle East; in 1992 I was again back in Europe and made the road of St. James between France and Galicia, Spain (el Camino de Santiago). On two occasions I have gone from the USA to Mexico City in my bicycle; the first one from Houston, Texas and the second from New York city, in 1993. This one took me 3 and a half months. In 1995 I went to Japan, and for 7 months I toured the whole country, from Narita to Hokkaidoo, and then south to Kagoshima, at the very tip of Kyushuu. I rode more than 7,000 kilometers in Japan.

All of these trips were made almost without money, and in all of those trips invariably I returned home with more money than I had when I left. I carried a sleeping bag and a tent, and whenever it started to get dark I started to look for a place to stay. I slept in all kind of weird places, including barns, houses under construction, cemeteries, buddhist temples, shinto jinjas, greek and roman ruins, chapels, medieval castles, caves, and so on. Lots of times people invited me to their places, and I made good friends along the way.

I met some very nice people, and I also had some horrible experiences. I enjoyed myself enormously, and I also suffered terribly. There is always, always a price to pay. That's the way we learn lessons from life, I suppose.

I still have to make at least another trip by bicycle. I have ridden 36,000 kilometers so far, I have 4 or 5,000 more to go to complete the perimeter of the world on the equator.

The other one thing I am proud of is the house that I built for and by myself in Tenango de Doria, a small town in the mountains of the Sierra Madre Oriental, a few hours from Mexico City. I worked hard on that house, and it took me a long time to make. (See Helicoid house). It is not yet finished, either. Some day I will build a second floor, which will be a geodesic dome.