pattern language
Along the Chama River near Abiquiú, New Mexico, artist Iren Schio fits together found objects, her own imagery, and a strong sense of design to create a unique desert home.
Iren Schio’s studio gives the artist plenty of space and light to create her mixed-media works, which often incorporate found objects, broken tiles, fossils, old machine parts . . .
Schio’s piece Equilibrium blends whimsy with a deceptively offhand precision. Martha Keats Gallery in Santa Fe shows her art.
The mosaic of a tree seems to grow outward from a potted plant by the bathtub.
Adobe arches, saltillo tile, and coarse plaster give the home a been-there- forever charm.
The Ferrous Couple, two metal sculptural figures, guard the front elevation of the home.
A section of the property fronts the Chama River.
Lighthearted road signs help visitors find their way.
Iren Schio and her husband, Bill Baird, often get a workout on their personal climbing wall, attached to the east side of Schio’s studio.
Iren Schio and her husband, Bill Baird
During a car trip to the West Texas town of Marfa, Iren Schio and Bill Baird stopped to admire a mosaic road sign. Schio, an accomplished mixed-media artist whose work is shown on several continents, was struck by the beauty of the mosaic work. When they returned to their home near Abiquiú, New Mexico, Schio immediately began to teach herself the art of mosaics. Schio and Baird were adding another room to their house, and Schio found her first mosaic project in the countertop around the sink in the new master bathroom.
At this same time a teacher at Abiquiú Elementary School asked Schio to teach art to the local children.
“I proposed mosaic projects,” Schio says. “I told the children to collect things to put into their mosaics—we included the whole spectrum of materials from broken pots to found objects in arroyos, broken tiles scavenged from shops in Santa Fe, glass, shiny stones. I did, however, instruct the children to not break their mother’s favorite china!”
Over the next five years Schio’s Abiquiú Elementary School mosaic projects grew to include similar programs at schools all over Rio Arriba County. And Schio and Baird’s home near the Chama River grew to include a sitting room and spa framed by a Schio masterpiece. Schio’s artistry is literally embedded in the plaster of this part of the house: a traditional nicho is framed by fossils, local stones, and an old truck mirror unearthed in the nearby foothills, all set into the finished stucco. And the walls of the spa are inlaid with a stunning mosaic mural.
Over one grand summer, using travertine, ceramic tile, fossils, crustaceans, black slate, and local flagstone cut into desired shapes and sizes with a wet tile saw, Schio assembled the magnificent tree, mesas, villages, Pedernal with evening star, clouds, and moons of the multiwall mosaic. Most of the mosaic unfolded intuitively, section by section. Because the centerpiece of the design, a tree, emerges nearly life-size from the corner over the hot tub, Schio sketched this part of the mosaic before she began work on it. The materials were pulled and selected as needed from a huge pile of stone and tile—“the organized mess”—kept beside the house that summer. Schio’s scavenging skills provided her with a wide variety of materials, textures, and colors for the mosaic wall.
It was a very time intensive and consuming project, but Schio claims that “time is no time when you’re doing mosaics! I become so absorbed in the process; time just goes by—a lot of time! But I don’t notice it. Mosaics are addicting!”
The mosaic surrounds the hot tub floor to ceiling, encircles the shower, and continues to the far wall. The result is a fantastically detailed mural made of hundreds of individual shapes and colors, each section and scene worthy of study and attention.
The pathways, patios, and garden areas connecting the studio, house, garage, and river also serve as integral pieces in the ongoing mosaic of Schio’s creative world. The patio beside the master bedroom has a chessboard made of leftover pieces of travertine set into the flagstone. Schio’s father introduced her to carpentry tools, and at Ghost Ranch she learned to weld. Schio’s large metal sculptures of assembled and found objects are permanently installed in the landscape along the river.
“I am interested in creating visual poetry,” Schio wrote for an exhibition of her work. “The physical act of assembling the found objects is important to me. I play, work, and turn them until the whole means more than the sum of the parts.”
Nowhere is Schio’s visual poetry more apparent than in the home she and Baird have created over 15 years along the Chama River. In and of themselves, the individual parts of their home are remarkable; as a whole, they create a personal, unique environment, a dynamic mosaic that merges art and daily life in an ongoing and joyful collaboration.
Situated on 20 acres several miles downstream from the village of Abiquiú, this bosque and river bottomland was the country of the prehistoric people of Poshuouinge and Abiquiú pueblos. The people of prehistory farmed irrigated fields along the river and hunted in the Jemez Mountains, their lives dictated by the cycles of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the ebb and flow of human needs and natural resources.
The phases of the moon and the cycles of the natural and modern world are important elements in the art of Schio. The Schio-Baird riverside compound, similarly influenced by the ebb and flow of the seasons, emerged over 15 years as time and materials were available. Like the first home builders in the valley, Schio and Baird built with their own hands using local wood, stone, and mud to create their pueblita on the river.
Although the architecture of the house and studio is traditional northern New Mexican—flat roofed, stuccoed Pueblo style—the Schio-Baird home’s aesthetic roots reach across the Atlantic to Europe, specifically to Schio’s birthplace in Switzerland and her fascination with found objects. Photographs of Schio’s childhood bedroom—a small space decorated literally floor to wall to ceiling with treasures she found in antiques shops or scavenged from local junk piles—document the beginning of the artistic style that would one day become her trademark as an internationally acclaimed artist.
Influenced by Miró, Klee, da Vinci, and native African artists, Schio studied at the Arts School of Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich, Switzerland, before moving to New Jersey in the early 1970s. Schio’s mixed-media monotypes, collages, sculptures, and mosaics are intuitive, introspective, and often brilliantly colored. And all of Schio’s two- and three-dimensional pieces embody her lifelong fascination with mathematics, geometric shapes, and with man-made and natural objects collected from her surroundings.
After reading about Mabel Dodge Luhan, O’Keeffe, and their contemporaries and about the art colonies of New Mexico, Schio came to see the Southwest in 1976. She was not disappointed: “Everything was bigger and brighter in New Mexico. It was love at first sight!”
Drawn to the space, color, light, and traditional art and craft of the native cultures of the Southwest, Schio moved to Santa Fe and joined its stimulating art community. Schio’s monoprints, already exhibited in Europe and on the East Coast, quickly found a home at the Martha Keats Gallery on Canyon Road. For the next 16 years Schio worked in her Santa Fe studio next to the Little Earth School, where she taught art part time and son Marcos attended school.
“It was a perfect schedule for a mother and an artist,” she says. “But then I got this itch to live in the country. A friend knew I was looking for land and in 1990 sold me acreage on the Chama River. There was nothing here, but I began to visit often. The land gets to you that way.”
When Marcos went off to college, Schio’s move to the country swiftly unfolded. Schio learned of an Abiquiú-based builder, Robert Vander, who was constructing inexpensive poured pumice-crete starter homes using a 22-by-40-foot footprint. Schio’s home began with this simple rectangle that incorporated a greenhouse for passive solar heat.
From this basic beginning Schio and Bill Baird, a German-born Los Alamos, New Mexico, engineer and systems designer she married in 1999, created a mosaic of indoor and outdoor living and working spaces as individualistic, eclectic, and imaginative as Schio’s paintings and sculptures.
“Bill showed me that I can build,” she says. “In your mind you might think that you can’t build. It’s too difficult! But Bill said, ‘We can do this.’ So we did. And it was very rewarding. We were not in a hurry and could go at our own pace. I loved it all!”
Schio’s introduction to home construction was almost accidental. Nervous about an upcoming gallery show, she “relaxed” by laying adobes into a wall beyond the house. “I just wanted to build a wall,” she says. “But the wall became a two-car garage!”
The next project was Schio’s studio. “I was working in the corner of the living room,” she says. “I needed more space!”
The studio was laid out on land east of the house. Because Baird and Schio could not erect the frames and pour pumice-crete themselves, they built the studio walls with cinder block. Cement fill made in a small mixer was carried up scaffolding by the bucketful and poured into the blocks. The concrete studio floor has a special Schio touch: local earth mixed with polyurethane was thrown onto the drying slab to give the surface a natural, sandstone texture.
“I didn’t want a smooth floor I had to keep sweeping!” she explains.
The studio includes an office, storage area, bathroom, and up a narrow, steep staircase, a small bedroom. The upstairs room has a fine view of the river bosque and surrounding mesas and actually is located in a tower, the exterior of which is a professional climbing wall. With holds made of found and created objects, Schio can practice a favorite sport—climbing and rappelling—without leaving home.
The interior of the studio is an impermanent collage of collected and scavenged treasures, many of which will eventually find their way into one of Schio’s signature assemblages: vintage leather suitcases, wooden crates, and metal bread boxes store shells, blocks, glass bottles, wire, nuts, bolts, rusted knives, and old carpentry and medical tools. Windowsills, work tables, and countertops exhibit impromptu arrangements of rocks, stones, bones, and pottery shards. Shelves hold vintage books and parts of books—spines, slices of yellowed pages from thick volumes, leather covers—from all over the globe.
The studio provides storage for the raw materials of Schio’s three-dimensional art: clocks, television and computer parts, cables and clamps, industrial hooks and pulleys, assorted doll parts, and the plaster casts of animal footprints found in the bosque. Energy—creative, mental, physical, spatial—pulses through Schio’s studio. It is the energy of the ongoing and continuous collaboration between an artist and her environment.
Construction of Schio’s studio was followed by the dining room addition to the main house. Again, Schio and Baird were in no hurry, and the new room took a year to build. The dining room completed, they began work on the private master bedroom suite. It was during this time in their lives that they drove south and west into the high desert country of Marfa, Texas (immortalized in the movie Giant), and stumbled onto the roadside mosaic sign.
Schio’s creative world has always been about collecting, assembling, and rearranging color and form. She gathers seemingly disconnected, even useless elements and transforms them into cohesive works of art. Schio and Baird’s home on the Chama River blends her two- and three-dimensional artistry into a fourth dimension: a complete environment that delights and engages the body, mind, heart, and soul.