Hasta la Vista

garden goddess

Mosaic artist Beverley Magennis creates inhabitable art by tiling her imaginative dwellings on the piney fringe of the Gila Wilderness.

By Charles C. Poling Photography by Jack Parsons

This article first appeared in Spring 2010 Su Casa

Far out on the western rim of New Mexico where the Mexican wolves roam in a county without traffic lights or chain restaurants, where all the roads are two-laners and you can drive for half an hour on a Tuesday morning without passing a car, where elk herds wash in primeval freedom back and forth across the landscape, artist Beverley Magennis has completed one towering, 18-foot Dome Lady hut swaddled in exquisite tile mosaic. It’s a conical shape like a minaret or an outsized hoop skirt topped by a larger-than-life woman’s head and torso. She—so compelling a figure deserves a personal pronoun—stands with her arms akimbo, her earrings like roses, painted in vivid colors. Another dome stands not quite done nearby.

Alongside the house and outbuildings built by Bev and her husband, Gary Harrold, the domes occupy a meadow of knee-high blue grama grass. A seasonal creek runs through this southward tilting valley. Densely forested hillsides rise on either side. The vast Gila country begins practically at the fence line. The neighbors are near enough to see but not to hail. Only the occasional whine of tires out on the highway interrupts the deep whoosh of wind through the pines on a chilly, cloudy morning.

Three more Dome Ladies live as a vision in Bev’s head—maybe she’ll build them, maybe not. Their completion hinges on the success of the property-for-sale sign stuck on the shoulder out by the highway. Sixteen years into her sojourn in the wild hinterlands of New Mexico with Gary, they’ve decided to move back to Albuquerque, in all likelihood hauling the domes by truck with them.

As we sit around the lunch table in the kitchen chatting, a wistful premonition of nostalgia seems to haunt Bev and Gary’s talk about leaving, though the conversation continually diverts to the place of art in society, the challenges of writing novels, the joys and irritations of New Mexico’s complicated culture, the ravages to their yard and garden by the ever-present elk.

Remote, gorgeous, off the radar for most of their friends who live closer to economic centers of gravity, their 10-acre homestead in Apache Creek shapes their daily routines. When the nearest supermarket is an hour-and-a-half run down the highway, you tend to organize your life differently than do city folk.

For Gary, a retired builder, Apache Creek gave him the chance to build their own house, then get into organic farming. With help from Bev when it came to weeding and harvesting, he worked inside a fenced enclosure—tall enough to keep out the elk—where he grew garlic, shallots, raspberries, asparagus, and other crops he could sell at farmers’ markets in Albuquerque.

Bev continued her art, much as she’d done in Albuquerque, where she created several large-scale public commissions familiar to thousands, including a mosaic walkway at the Albuquerque Museum and a tree of life mosaic sculpture at Fourth Street and Montaño Road. Longtime Su Casa readers will remember Bev’s tour-de-force Tile House, which we featured in our Spring 2007 issue. Seemingly every surface of that unassuming North Valley house wears some kind of mosaic—tiles on the outside, matchbooks, pennies, cereal boxes, and what have you blanketing the interior walls, ceilings, and cabinets. The Tile House now belongs to Bev’s daughter Erin (also a mosaic artist).

At the Munson Gallery in Santa Fe in the early 1990s, Bev had been selling life-size mosaic “Garden Ladies” and smaller raku-fired figurines that she called “Good Fortune Dolls.” These latter came in sets, each doll representing the elements of a good life: abundance, charity, trust, and so on. But after a “disappointment with a gallery, I thought, I don’t want to be in a gallery,” Bev says. “I want to tile my house. It was so much fun! It was really what art should be. For me, it’s all about the process, the commitment to a long-term project. It was all about the colors and the shapes.”

After that immense project, Bev was teaching art at the University of New Mexico and making the life-size garden figures. A student suggested “making one big enough to live in. I thought that would be so cool.”

Apache Creek provided the opportunity. Bev and Gary moved there after a camping trip in the Gila. “We were coming out of the Gila in the evening,” Gary says, “looking out over these mesas and mountains. Then we were driving along the highway here and we saw this sign. Bev said, ‘I’d die and go to heaven if I could live there.’”

Still, Bev didn’t start the first Dome Lady for several years, and it took her a few years to finish, working steadily all the while: “I’m a maniac once I get going.” She built the hut first, digging a circular trench about 12 feet in diameter into which she poured concrete with PVC pipe inserted vertically every three feet. Then she inserted rebar into the PVC and gathered the top ends into a ring, something like the tension ring that holds up a yurt. Then she lathed around the outside and hired a worker to help her plaster inside and out. She made the floor of bricks on sand, with a tile mosaic rug in the center. Cabinets, a small sink, a bed, and a few pieces of furniture complete the interior design today.

The outside tile pattern features 13 ladies, all friends of Bev’s, each holding a flowering tree of life, each unique. Bev’s dogs and cats, along with chickens and other birds, complete the imagery. The bold colors against a large black field are typical of her strongly graphic style. The images read well from a distance. Up close the finer details draw the attention. Bev sculpted the figure on top from Bondo and a wire frame—a mistake, she says, because it didn’t support the head, which has since sunk into the neck. She’ll use lath and plaster on the next one.

A non-mosaic artist can only imagine the patience, the tolerance for minutiae, and the constant focus on the big picture required to create a large, intricate design. Bev used an uncountable number of tile pieces. At one point, the tiles she made to be the skirts on the figures of her friends cracked and she had to replace them, a demoralizing setback that cost her a year’s work.
The second, nearly completed Dome Lady sports abstract geometric patterning. Bev used up her tile scraps and broken bits on this one. It lacks the figurine on top and still needs to be grouted. Bev built this dome as a bathhouse companion to the bedroom of the first. If Bev finishes all five, they’ll form a klatch of sleeping quarters around the central bath facilities, a unique bed and breakfast in this part of the world. But about three years ago, “I got burned out,” she says. “I couldn’t do any mosaics. I’m not sure I can do another.”

Monumental landmark art on a scale like this demands attention, though in a landscape this big, you don’t sense the imposing size of the finished Dome Lady till you come up the driveway past her. Art’s impact and meaning derives from cultural and physical context. When you see Bev’s tile mosaics in the city, they emerge from the background clutter like filings arranged by the force lines of a magnet: out of the urban chaos comes beauty, shaped from seemingly random ceramic bits. Here on the threshold of a vast wilderness, the Dome Ladies—which would loom gigantic in town—announce human creativity in a stage whisper. They’re an artistic outpost, a stark yet humble proclamation of humanity’s higher instincts amidst the messy vitality of virgin land.

As down-to-earth and plainspoken as Bev is, she may not fret over such abstractions. She tiles by compulsion. Lucky for us. And maybe it’s also lucky for us—the masses living in New Mexico’s biggest city, nigh onto four hours up the highway—that she’s moving back to town, where we can appreciate her next project. Whatever that may be, it’s sure to stimulate contemplation.

If a Dome Lady or two stays behind in Apache Creek, I love the idea of them presiding silently over this howling wilderness. What could be more American?