In the Museo Nacional de Antropología, in Mexico City, stands a small ceramic statue of Xipe Totec. The figure, slightly hunched, wears the flayed skin of his latest victim, covered in a stylized texture of blood. I imagine ektor garcia visiting Xipe Totec, in the city that was once his home, before he became itinerant, patching together a life of crocheted doilies, knotted ceramics, woven chains, and stapled leather wherever an artist’s livelihood could be temporarily secured.

He created these assemblages for X-TRA while moving between Basel, Glasgow, New York, and the green hills of Argyll and Bute, Scotland. Like Xipe Totec, garcia’s creations clothe themselves in the vegetal and animal skins of sacrificial others. Black leather, sewn and woven together, reappears as worn gloves, burnt from kiln fires, and in an image of cows grazing. Maguey tips from the agave plant become the pre-threaded sewing needle that sews together textiles and pierces tongues, ears, noses, and penises for bloodletting. The artist follows the Scottish sheep, “fallen moving terrestrial clouds,” and finds the fences and brambles where they have lost pieces of themselves. He gathers this wool and twists it into rope. Perhaps it is the same rope that reappears in his drawing of a Mayan goddess, who uses the absorbent material to soak up the blood that flows from her pierced tongue. Or maybe it is just a way to stay connected and tied to a history, a moving place—much like garcia’s ceramic knots and chains, which accumulate in obsessive piles, chains made literally of location, of earth.

—Candice Lin