Lift Off

I felt inspired to write this month’s blog post because a lot has been happening here in TierraMitica particularly in the sculpting space with Fantasyscaping which has been my personal area of focus pretty much since arriving at TierraMitica. For those unfamiliar with Fantasyscaping, it is the brand we have created to promote and market our sculpting capabilities. All of the amazing creations around TierraMitica are showcased on www.fantasyscaping.com which is a vehicle intended to reach potential customers from all over the world. Our ambition is to be creating not just sculptures, but entire sculpted and colorfully painted environments, to clients all over the world.

This blog post is not really intended to be an update about recent developments, although that is certainly part of it. It is about my personal journey, how it all began, what I have lived over the past decade since the very first moment I put cement on a spatula and where we find ourselves now.

It has been ten years since the first spark of inspiration which led me to create my first sculpture, a giant butterfly perched on a flower. It started out as kind of an experiment, I was keen to reconnect with my creative side, a side of me I was very familiar with as a child but totally abandoned as I grew older and pursued a practical and safe corporate life to the point that I eventually believed that I did not have a creative bone in my body.

After my first workshop I really felt that I wanted to reconnect with my creativity and with the recent construction of the art studio this was also a direction that TierraMitica was encouraging. My decision to stay at TierraMitica was a leap of faith in many ways. I was used to the ‘safety’ and ‘security’ that my past life offered, and to walk away from it seemed quite daunting, but at the same time I was bored shitless by it and really wanted to live something different, I wanted to live an adventure. It was not such a difficult choice to stay at TierraMitica, after all community life is something I was seeking at the time, I felt revitalised by the sense of adventure and I had the aspirations to explore my creativity further and one day make great things of it.

The first major project I was involved in was the organisation of the Astronave Mythic Party. The Astronave is a purpose-built gallery with consecutive murals illustrating the story of the myth of the goddess ayahuasca. We built this building for professional artists to come and paint, and us TierraMiticans were the event organisers. We worked day and night to make the event run smoothly but we were not the creators, we did not feel the pride of creating something beautiful. We did not believe WE were artists and that the pride was reserved for the “professionals”. I also believed at the time, despite having made a couple of sculptures, that I was not a creator, that I was not an artist.

Sometime after the Astronave Mythic Party we started planning for the following year’s event which was intended to be an even bigger version of the Astronave with many many more walls for other artists to paint for us. Then, influenced by many things going on at the time we had a realization that made us question how we were going about this. Why would we bust our guts preparing for a huge event, slaving away in the kitchen and working day and night only for other people to feel the pride of the artwork that was created? Why do we consider ourselves, or anybody else who wanted to participate for that matter, to be any different from the professional artists?

As a community we decided to dare and together we banded together to create “La Mama”. In just three short months we worked together to sculpt the giant 3m tall sculpture of the pregnant mother-earth goddess sitting in the lotus position. This idea lit me up and I put my hand up to coordinate the effort and to be a driving force to see it though. My enthusiasm and energy lead me to become the project leader not only for this but for all of the subsequent art projects we have done since. La Mama was the first of what would be a series of large sculptures in our sculpture plaza, Plaza La Cuna, devoted to the various stages of life. La Mama was devoted to pregnancy and in her belly she was cultivating my potential and the potential of all of the TierraMiticans as artists who would then go on to create so many more incredible works of art year after year.

A couple of years on, after the creation of our recording studio, La Mente, and our amphitheater, El Huevo de la Vida. It was clear that we were elevating our artwork to higher and higher levels and we decided that we would move in the direction of marketing our capabilities to one day contract ourselves as professional sculptors, to offer sculpting and painting services and events to paying customers. This intention was a big part of our inspiration to create Umbala!, a prototype for a fully interactive playground, fun for all ages filled with sculptures and artwork that could be created in the context of a community-based event, sponsored by a municipality and members of the very community that would benefit from it would be active participants in the sculpting and painting. We went all-in in every way possible, we devoted pretty much the entire year of 2019 busting our guts to build an enormous sculpted playground with all kinds of fun and magical worlds. We then hosted a huge sculpting extravaganza and an even huger mythic party which was attended by over 60 people. Even though I believed in the potential of this concept, I had my doubts that this would ever go anywhere. I even remember thinking to myself that the idea that this would take off was too far-fetched to ever go anywhere. Afterall, we were just a bunch of misfits, tucked away in the jungle of Peru, miles away from anything, totally isolated from any passers-by who might eventually ‘discover’ us.

Umbala! was completed in the Mythic Party in January of 2020 and we had decided to commit all of our effort to market and sell the concept. We even registered to attend a major Parks & Recreations summit later in the year where we would have the opportunity to directly sell our concept to major decision-makers of major Parks & Recreations directors in the United States – a prospect we felt was incredibly promising and could be the tipping point that would have made all of our efforts pay off. The instant we were ready to pull trigger, to make the big decision to travel and sell our concept, COVID hit! The entire world came to a grinding halt… the wind taken entirely out of our sails and even when the world recovered from COVID the subsequent societal and political changes meant that the plan was not viable – we could not see this as the way forward for the time being. Instantly the doubts that I had inside were realized. 

This was the moment for us TierraMiticans to remember who we are… Mythic motherfuckers who do not give up in the face of adversity – so we persevered. We changed tact and started creating art that we considered to be of interest to potential businesses such as hotels, resorts, recreation centres and mini golf courses for example and even private customers, but we kept the fun and playful energy, our essence as artists. From here we expanded our portfolio to include a Jungle Book inspired firepit temple, and then an indoor magical environment with a natural mineral hot spring with an adjoining garden with all kinds of automated sculptures with fire effects, a musical wind organ and all kinds of cool water features that were synchronised with music.

Our inspiration grew and we continued to expand our portfolio with different kinds of amazing works of art until… the pièce de resistance… an idea that grew from our game of Dungeons & Dragons that all of the men at TierraMitica were playing every Saturday. We had outgrown our small game room that we aptly called The Dungeon and the idea came up to build a dedicated game room which we have named Citadel Fury, built to resemble an old-style medieval castle with a giant fire breathing red dragon on top with the interior adorned with life-sized character sculptures of each of our characters. For me, this is by far the most impressive project we have in TierraMitica and not only is it the most immersive Dungeons & Dragons game room in the world but serves as an incredible gaming experience we can sell to the growing number of roleplaying game (RPG) enthusiasts to come for immersive D&D vacations here in the jungle.

We soon struck a partnership with a Canadian game master who brought a small group of players to run a pilot gaming retreat we named “RPG in the Jungle” in February of this year. The group was blown away not only by Citadel Fury itself, but also the amazing hosting experience we put on, we gave them all of our love and blew them away with our true TierraMitica hospitality.

The success of this event was proof of concept of the RPG in the Jungle event and we are deepening our partnership with the game master as well as one of the other attendees who happens to own one of the largest game shops in the United States. We have already scheduled the next RPG in the Jungle event later this year and are expecting it to be twice the size of the first. The combination of our passion in sculpting and our love of the game has now materialized into a whole new service offering that has the potential to generate substantial income through RPG in the Jungle events but it also serves as a vehicle to showcase our art for potential sculpting commissions. Already, after just the first pilot, we have had conversations with the game shop owner who has expressed interest in commissioning fantasy sculptures.

Concurrently to this, we reached out to a local real estate developer who is building three massive residential developments, all with a Swiss theme, close by to TierraMitica and invited him and his business colleagues to see all that we have created at TierraMitica. When they came to visit they were so blown away with all of our artwork they could not believe they had stumbled across us. Our style, energy and our artwork is exactly what they have been looking for to make their development stand apart from their competitors. They instantly invited us to their development, explained their vision for the common areas and invited us to come up with ideas. Within just a few weeks they commissioned us for three separate projects, one to paint their water tank with a Swiss-themed mural and two separate scenes we are now in the process of creating. The first a Swiss mountain man playing the Alpenhorn with a St Bernard rescue dog by his side and the second a cute scene of the characteristic Swiss Heidi milking a cow with a little calf by her side. These are work in progress so there are no photos to show just yet.

We have even more opportunities ahead, some with the current client and some discussions with other potential clients. We are very much in the early days of working professionally and have some ways to go, but we have started walking the path. Right now we are in the midst of transitioning ourselves from a group of hobbyist artists to a lean mean fighting machine of professionals who create unique, high-quality art with a super professional and commercial focus. We are transforming the way that we work, finding ways of working efficiently, with a business mindset but at the same time preserving the very essence that brought us to this place.

If I look back over the past decade, the amount of energy and love that I and all of the TierraMiticans poured into creating the multitude of sculptures and art installations here is now bearing the fruits I had been hoping for all of these years. If you told me ten years ago when I built my first sculpture where this would lead, I probably would not have believed you. And even now that it is starting to happen I can barely believe it, it seems too good to be true. I had many hopes and aspirations that we would one day be making sculptures professionally, and although there were setbacks along the way, although there was the temptation, I never gave up hope and just kept going.

I look back to the very beginning, the days when I did not believe I was not an artist, when I did not believe that I was capable of creating the amazing works of art that I have overseen here at TierraMitica. I look at how I have grown, and how every single TierraMitican has grown at the same time and realize that any dream and aspiration can be realized, no matter the setbacks.

That was the past decade, what about the next? We already have so many plans for the future of the community such as a school for our children which can be fully sculpted to create an immersive environment designed to facilitate children’s learning and for them to explore and develop their own creativity. I see a future where we have a dedicated area with themed accommodation and facilities for the RPG in the Jungle event where we can be hosting many groups in various different themed game rooms all at the same time. I see a future where customers are lining up for us to create totally immersive environments for them whether it be a themed game room such as a dungeon castle like ours or a medieval tavern or even an alien spaceship for the similar sci-fi RPGs. I do believe a time will come in the future where a municipality will call us to run an Umbala! in the way it was initially intended, where we will dream together, sculpt together, paint together and share in the pride of our amazing creations together. I gotta tell you it feels so fucking good to look back over the past decade and see that we are now at the precipice and about to enter a whole new dimension with our art.

Now where to from here… it feels like it has all just begn