22 Portales
A Geometry of Coherence
An exhibition of textile portals woven with the traditional communities in Mexico
22 Portals is a collaborative textile project and exhibition that unites Oaxacan weaving traditions, tarot archetypes, sacred geometry, and harmonic mathematics into a circle of twenty-two handwoven “portals.”
Each piece acts as a phase state of coherence — a meditative field that guides the viewer from separation toward unity, from question into realization.
The project is created in Oaxaca, Mexico with weavers, using ancestral techniques, natural dyes, and raw materials gathered from the local environment — rocks, leaves, sticks, minerals. Copper thread is carefully woven for both conductivity and visual resonance.
Rather than illustrating tarot symbolism, each textile expresses its underlying geometry: the archetypes as apertures, waveforms, or harmonic structures that hold symmetry, rhythm, and stillness.
The Concept
At the heart of the project is a simple truth:
Thought is a waveform seeking geometric resolution.
A pattern finds coherence the moment the waveform settles into harmony.
Each of the twenty-two woven portals is designed as a harmonic lens:
Geometry becomes the tuning fork.
Color and symmetry stabilize attention.
Copper threads carry tension and contrast, acting as conductive pathways.
The viewer’s own field entrains with the pattern through stillness.
Thus, 22 Portals is not a fortune-telling deck, but a living textile journey that mirrors the movement of awareness from fragmentation to coherence.
Each piece is accompanied by a brief poetic statement — not a meaning, not a definition, but a resonance.
Material and Cultural Integration
Wool spun and woven by Zapotec artisans in Oaxaca
Plant dyes: mangrove, marigold, mesquite, huizache, clay
Natural inclusions: leaves, small stones, sticks, earth pigments
Copper thread woven as accents of conduction and symmetry
Zapotec symbolism and cosmology grounding each card in the seven directions
Sacred geometry & mathematics guiding proportion, division, and layout
Each textile becomes a unique intersection of ancestral craft, mathematical structure, and contemplative design.
Structure of the 22 Portals
The portals move through a harmonic sequence reflecting:
the major tarot arcana archetypes, reinterpreted as geometry
the Zapotec directional cross (6 sacred animals)
Sacred geometry, mathematics and harmonic states (collapse, expansion, coherence, inversion, union)
Every portal holds a different state of coherence
a moment in the movement from contraction to expansion, oscillation to clarity, fragmentation to unity.\
How Visitors Experience the Exhibition
1. Daily Hours — Self-Guided Audio Journey
Visitors can walk through the exhibition with a guided audio meditation, allowing them to experience each portal as a coherence field:
slowing perception
settling attention
inviting breath-based attunement
experiencing each textile as a meditative gateway
This creates a quiet, introspective experience of art as fieldwork.
2. Live event Nights — Group Coherence Rituals
On select evenings, the exhibition hosts:
a live tarot game using the 22 portals
deep group meditation
improvised and composed soundscapes by Macarena Palazuelos https://www.macarenapalazuelos.com, guiding the collective into stillness.
These nights explore how coherence deepens when experienced together, not just individually.
Bio
Maz is a textile artist and founder of Design By Nature, a studio in Oaxaca Mecico dedicated to exploring the relationship between nature, pattern, material, and human perception.
Her work bridges traditional printing and weaving practices—particularly those learned in collaboration with Zapotec artisans in Oaxaca and through studies in Japan—with contemporary research into natural fibers, plant dyes, and conductive materials.
Through this cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach, she investigates how coherent textiles can support healing, grounding, magnetism, focus, and contemplative presence.
Her ongoing research integrates art and science to better understand how textile structure shapes the way we feel and show up.
With her project 22 Portals: A Geometry of Coherence, she brings this work to a wider public, inviting people to experience textiles not only as objects of beauty, but as immersive fields of stillness and resonance.
22 Portals is a textile cosmology — a woven journey through coherence.
It brings together mathematical proportion, Zapotec lineage, sacred geometry, copper conductivity, and contemplative narrative.
Each piece is a portal: a geometry of stillness, a mirror for the observer, a field where patterns resolve into harmony.
Through weaving, color, symmetry, and collective presence,
22 Portals invites visitors to experience art as a living meditation —
…a quiet return to the center where all directions meet.