An Interactive Poetic Installation at the Rurally Good Festival

When you crawl to a chapel, you search for grace. When you offer a prayer, you ask for wisdom and healing. When you light a candle, you light it for someone you’ve lost. There’s no place at our traditional altars, however, to remember people who are alive but gone. No space to process who has altered your heart. 

For the festival, I created a new space to bring failures and heartaches and hope, and turn them into epiphanies. A space where you can participate by bringing mementos from relationships both damaging and radiant. A space where we light candles for broken friends and former lovers, and canonize the little beauties these hard things have grown within you. At this very human altar, we honor the best pieces of people who have been in our lives, creating a space that allows us to walk out embodying these pieces with gratitude.

Photography credit: Becky Bunny Garner (digital), Laur Lewis Neal (35mm). Video credit: Becky Bunny Garner (image), Gregory De Iulio (score and sound mix).

Process and Materials.

Grin City Collective, Grinnell, Iowa. My residency studio was an antique corn crib, with handcrafted plank floors and windows looking out onto rolling green fields. The Collective’s mission is to bring art to the rural community, so it was a fitting canvas.

After I completed the poem, the massive desk got the boot and I began installation work by painting silhouettes of saints in an homage to my time on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail in Spain. I brought from Los Angeles candle holders and confession doors from church suppliers and candles from local botanicas. The hay bales came from a local horse farmer who graciously let me wander his barns in search of just the right hue, and the peonies came from the farm’s garden. The photographs, letters, and other mementos strewn across the bales came from my Saints.