Ra Paulette is a self-taught artist who has spent more than three decades digging and carving caves into the soft sandstone hills of northern New Mexico, using nothing but hand tools. Since he began in 1990 he has created over a dozen of these underground rooms, with sculpted pillars, skylights and niches that turn daylight into something close to stage lighting. He is not a hermit who fled society, as viral headlines once suggested, but he does work largely alone, often with only his dog for company, and his story became the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary.
Who is Ra Paulette?
Paulette was born in August 1940 in Indiana and grew up in the north-west of the state near Lake Michigan. He later settled in New Mexico, a region where people have carved homes and shelters into soft rock for centuries. He has no formal training in architecture, sculpture or structural engineering. What he has instead is patience, a feel for the rock, and a willingness to spend years on a single space.
His tools are basic: shovels, pickaxes, scrapers and a wheelbarrow to haul out tonnes of sand. Each cave starts as a narrow opening in a hillside, like the doorway in the image above, and slowly grows into a sequence of chambers. Light wells cut through the ceiling let shafts of sun travel across the walls during the day, so the rooms change from hour to hour.
Why he digs: wonder rather than art for sale
Asked whether he is obsessed with digging, Paulette has answered with a question of his own: Is a child obsessed with play?
The point he makes is simple. When work feels like play, you want to do it all the time.
He has described his caves as environmental and spiritual projects more than as art objects, places meant to move visitors emotionally through scale, silence and light. He has also been reluctant to call himself an artist, preferring to describe himself as someone expressing a sense of wonder. Visitors and critics tend to disagree with his modesty; a 1996 Los Angeles Times feature already described one of his caves as a sanctuary for prayer and meditation.
That vision also explains the tensions in his career. Paulette is famous for following the rock and his own imagination rather than a fixed plan, which can make a project grow far beyond what a client expected.
Inside the caves
The caves range from small meditation rooms to large, multi-chamber spaces. Typical features include:
- Carved columns and arches that look structural but are shaped from the living rock.
- Skylights and light shafts that throw moving beams across the floor.
- Niches, benches and basins cut into the walls, sometimes inlaid with stones or decorated with relief patterns.
- Smooth, flowing surfaces finished by hand scraping, which give the rooms a soft, almost organic look.
His best-known public work is the Windows of the Earth shrine near Black Mesa, built over about two and a half years for a property north of Santa Fe. It now belongs to the Origin at Rancho de San Juan resort, which offers guided docent tours by appointment. Most of his other caves are on private land and are not open to the public, so do not go looking for them without permission. Sandstone can collapse, and the sites are owned by people who value their privacy.
The documentary Cavedigger
For many years Paulette was known mostly to locals and to the clients who commissioned his work. That changed when filmmaker Jeffrey Karoff, who funded the project himself, made Cavedigger, a 39-minute documentary released in 2013. The film follows Paulette at work and shows the friction that came with it: patrons often expected a modest project, while he took years and kept expanding the vision, which led to disputes over money and scope. Near the end he starts a planned ten-year cave of his own.
A correction to a claim that spread widely online: Cavedigger did not win an Oscar. It was nominated for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 86th Academy Awards in March 2014. The nomination alone brought Paulette international attention, followed by TV features and widely shared online clips.
The video below offers a tour of his caves and his own reflections on the work.
A long tradition of carved spaces
Paulette's work sits within a much older human practice. People have carved dwellings and sacred spaces into soft rock for thousands of years: the cave houses of Cappadocia in Turkey, the rock churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia, Petra in Jordan and, closer to home, the cliff dwellings and cavates made by Ancestral Puebloans in New Mexico, such as those at Bandelier National Monument. What makes his caves different is their purpose. They are not homes or defensive shelters but spaces made almost entirely for beauty and contemplation, by one person, without machines.
What his story teaches
- Mastery comes from time. Paulette had no formal training; decades of daily practice taught him how the rock behaves.
- Passion has costs. His commitment to his vision produced extraordinary spaces, but also conflicts with clients. Clear agreements matter in any creative commission.
- Simple tools can be enough. Shovels and scrapers, used with patience, created rooms that people travel far to see.
- Work can be play. His own question about the child at play is a reminder that the most absorbing work rarely feels like an obsession from the inside.
If you are in northern New Mexico, booking a tour of Windows of the Earth is the respectful way to experience one of his caves in person.
Sources: Wikipedia: Ra Paulette; Wikipedia: Cavedigger; video and story originally shared via Sun Gazing.
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