Framed poster
An axolotl portrait that arrives mounted and ready for the wall: that's this framed axolotl print. It's Ikal, facing forward, in a red plaid shirt and denim jacket against a plain background, a character from my Animal Kinhood series.
Ambystoma mexicanum
Working the chinampa means caring for the water where the last axolotl lives.
Endemic exclusively to the canals and chinampas of the Xochimilco lake system, in Mexico City, at 2,240 meters of altitude. It inhabits the muddy beds of cold fresh water (between 6 and 20 °C), among aquatic vegetation such as ahuejote and water lily, in low-current zones. Its historic habitat also included the now-extinct lakes of Chalco and Texcoco.
In the image there's an axolotl with pale pink skin, red feathery gills poking out on either side of his head, and a wide mouth curved upward, that half-smile they come with from the factory. He wears the red plaid shirt and the worn blue denim jacket. I created him looking straight ahead, against a plain background: framed and hung, he reads whole from the doorway, with nothing taking up his space.
That year Ikal helped return eighteen of his own kind to the canal. Only one is still alive, darker than the rest, and he's seen it twice in the same bend. He never told anyone: he wrote down the date and went back to what he was doing. This portrait carries something of that idea — something that comes back to its place and stays — except here the place is your wall. Who Ikal is, where he's from, and what he stands for is in the character's biography.
