When she was a child, Priscilla Dobler Dzul wanted to be an Egyptologist. Obsessed by ancient culture, she devoured Egyptian mythology and even practiced mummification under the tutelage of her Scottish American grandmother, a woman passionate about science who instructed Dobler Dzul how to preserve small roadkill with borax and salt. On clear nights in Wollochet Bay far from the haze of urban light, she would also take Dobler Dzul outside to teach her about the stars. “She would talk to us about the cosmologies and mythologies of my history,” Dobler Dzul recalls. “She would tell us, I need you to understand how the planets work and how to study the stars, so you can see what it is that people have always been fascinated by.”
But Dobler Dzul had a hard time wrapping her head around the scientific language of astronomy. Instead, it was the stories her Maya grandfather told that unlocked the mysteries of the heavens. “There’s beauty in astronomy, but I could never grasp it fully,” Dobler Dzul says. “But if you create a story to tell me how the tail of the crocodile was pushing all the stars, or how a giant serpent was eating all these stars and planets, flying through the sky…”
Drawing on the stories passed down from her ancestors is what drives Dobler Dzul’s work as an adult. Dobler Dzul now lives in Tacoma, where she works as an artist. Her solo exhibit, Water Carries the Stories of Our Stars, which opened last month at the Frye Art Museum, brings together a new body of sculpture, textiles, and video that tell a story about the connections threading through the Pacific Northwest and the Yucatán.
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