Serpent in the Garden

1 of 1 | Paul Henry Devoti — Atlantis Studio, my studio home in the pueblo of San Juan de Oriente, Nicaragua

In the ancient Aztec cosmological calendar, twenty sacred symbols mapped the universe — the movements of stars, the turning of seasons, the invisible agreements between man and the cosmos. The Serpent is among them. Eternal, coiling, knowing.

In Serpent in the Garden, Paul Henry Devoti brings that 5,000-year-old symbolic language into living dialogue with the natural world. The serpent winds through a field of all twenty Aztec day-signs, rendered in meticulous hand-carved relief across the surface of this large-format ceramic vessel. Against that ancient grammar, butterflies emerge — shaved directly into the slip clay and painted in luminous contemporary metallic pigments — representing the garden, Mother Earth, and the fragile beauty the cosmos holds in its orbit.

The technique is uncompromising. Every symbol is scratched and etched by hand into unfired clay in Paul's studio home in the pueblo of San Juan de Oriente, Nicaragua — a village that has been hand-forming ceramic art for over 2,500 years. Contemporary metallic pigments are then worked into the carved channels, making the surface shift between shadow and light depending on where you stand.

This is a one-of-a-kind work. There is no edition. There is no reproduction. When it finds its collector, the conversation between the ancient sky and the living earth finds its permanent home.

Dimensions: 12 × 9 × 9 inches

Medium: Ceramic with slip-clay shaving, hand engraving, and contemporary metallic pigment

Origin: Atlantis Studio — studio home of Paul Henry Devoti, pueblo of San Juan de Oriente, Nicaragua

Edition: 1 of 1