Prayer Beads for the Anthropocene
A solo ExhibItION by Lia Huntington
Exhibition Runs: April 6th - April 26th
About the exhibition:
Through Prayer Beads for the Anthropocene, Lia Huntington will be exploring how we sustain ourselves in a world so full of destruction, and how we can learn to use where we are in this age of the anthropocene to foster a sense of safety within ourselves. She will be documenting human interactions with public spaces through paper making and metal smithing processes. The fiber, paper, and fabricated metal structures she creates will act as portals to explore our individual experiences as we move through life within Philadelphia.
The English word bead comes from the Old English word for prayer, gebed, which is connected to similar words in Middle Dutch and Old German. Embedded in the form of the bead is the idea of making a prayer: completing a ritual, the solace that can come from repetitive actions and familiar rhythms. The objects we interact with routinely, and the sensations we gain through those interactions, can become portals to what heals us.
Like words and ideas, the materials and experiences in life are connected to those that have come before and those that are to come. Materials and experiences become categorized either as resources to be valued, tended, and used--or as waste to be neglected and sent elsewhere. Both individually and collectively we surround ourselves with resources and waste--they intertwine, strengthening or weakening a system through the ways they interconnect. Our shared spaces accumulate traces of each other: we are embedded in inherited surroundings and the remnants we leave behind connect us to one another.
Our current era of the Anthropocene has emerged from the last few centuries of accruing human impacts on the planet. The climate and environment are being devastatingly transformed. Unjust, exploitative systems continue to compound harm through global imbalances in access to resources and ways of managing waste. Avenues of access to each of these is not evenly distributed; rather, marginalized communities across the world bear the weight of poisoned water and land, while those in privileged positions consume resources to excess. The imbalances in our use of materials has irrevocably changed the planet and harms our connections.
We need to find avenues for solace to stave off despair in the face of the world’s sorrows. Sustaining ourselves individually and as a collective requires a balance of resources and waste.
This work seeks to find beauty in our shared spaces, in materials that are often discarded or overlooked. It processes materials and experiences through repetitive, meditative actions: breaths, footsteps, stitches, forming metal, threading beads, tying knots. The work considers how sustaining ourselves individually involves each of us accumulating experiences that nourish and replenish us. It explores how we can collectively assemble balances that support all of us: seeking to recategorize and better share resources and waste so we can each tend to ourselves and to the web of others more fully.
In congruence with the Everyday Futures Fest, Prayer Beads for the Anthropocene will be on view in Gallery 2 beginning April 7th, and will be available as a video walkthrough shortly after. Join us at Da Vinci Art Alliance for the opening reception on April 9th from 4-7pm.
To learn more about Lia, visit her website, www.liahuntington.com.