Marie Watt, Sky Dances Light Forest (2023). Tin jingles, cotton twill tape, polyester mesh, steel ... [+] 230 x 58 x 39 in.
The space between sky and earth. Marie Watt’s (b. 1967; Seneca) most recent artworks live there, taking inspiration from her culture’s Creation Story. Polyester Tape
Across the nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, of which the Seneca are a member, the story varies slightly, but in it, broadly speaking, Sky-woman falls out–or is pushed–through a hole in Sky World where a sacred tree once stood. Falling toward a water world below, the animals there–geese, heron, otter, muskrat and turtle–agree to break her fall. She lands on the back of a turtle, which becomes Turtle Island–North America.
Watt’s “jingle clouds” envision the sky opening, Sky-woman falling through.
“This space between sky and earth has always been a space that, for me, subverts this Western fascination with a horizon line,” Watt told Forbes.com. “My Seneca perspective (is) thinking of our orientation to this space as omni directional. There are cardinal directions–north, south, east and west–but we are not fixed on the orientation of horizon line.”
The world view of Indigenous people across North America is generally circular, cyclical–the sun and the moon, the seasons, rebirth, continuum–in opposition to the linear perspective of the continent’s white colonizers–starting points, ending points, birth, life, death, roads, objectives.
A globe versus a map. The globe is more accurate, the map more common.
Marie Watt, Sky Dances Light Forest (2023). Marie Watt Studio Assistant for scale. Tin jingles, ... [+] cotton twill tape, polyester mesh, steel 230 x 58 x 39 in.
From June 10 through September 30, 2023, Watt and Kavi Gupta gallery in Chicago invite visitors to explore this space between sky and earth during the exhibition “Marie Watt: Sky Dances Light.” The presentation centers her new series of jingle clouds: biomorphic, hanging sculptures assembled from tens of thousands of jingle cones, rolled pieces of tin historically fashioned from the circular lids of tobacco containers.
“I feel like sometimes I've done a disservice referring to them as clouds because I think that word almost limits what they are,” Watt said.
Some of the pieces stretch 10-feet-long, hanging nearly to the floor more like forests.
Watt’s interest in jingles began at the Denver Art Museum. She had previously been the museum’s Native Arts Artist-in-Residence in 2013 and on a subsequent visit that year, hosted a sewing circle where a pair of Native pow wow dancers, including a jingle dancer, participated.
“We were sewing this piece while this pow wow was happening (outside) and there's those sounds and smells and your senses are completely activated by the music and the drum beat, the food and the company,” Watt recalls.
Seeking to bring that energy and sensation to her artwork, Watt began affixing jingles onto fabric, wall-hung pieces. These, along with her blanket totems, have become signatures of her practice, unique, instantly recognizable, and on view throughout America’s top art museums.
The jingle clouds, however, go further.
“One of the things I realized had to happen when I started incorporating jingles into that very first piece is that it needed to be away from a wall because that's what gave you the sense that the jingles might make a sound,” Watt explains. “If they’re flush to a wall, then it feels static, but if it moves away from the wall, all of a sudden you get the sense that it could play music.”
In the Kavi Gupta exhibition, Watt’s artworks are suspended, occupying the space between the ceiling and floor, between sky and earth.
“My work has been a slow evolution to the point of realizing these amorphous, organic forms that are saturated in these jingles,” Watt said.
She has disposed of the fabric backing, composing these artworks entirely of jingles – thousands of them, one weighing upwards of 100-pounds. Some feature motorized attachments subtly turning the pieces, allowing the jingles to move and create sound like a windchime.
In addition to animating the jingle clouds in three dimensions, Watt sought to incorporate a hands-on element for the new pieces.
“Part of the goal was to bring into form a situation where people could interact with them because the impulse to touch has always been there–whether to touch the blanket or to touch the jingles, or to hear them make that sound,” she said.
At the gallery, visitors enter the exhibition through a jingle threshold: a shimmering, tin cone curtain hung from blue strands implying water and sky. Guests will further be able to physically engage with the jingle clouds.
Though their invention and use as fashion adornments dates at least to the late 1800s, jingle cones became an iconic element of Indigenous dance traditions during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.
“There was this very sick child, and the (Ojibwe) father had this dream,” Watt explains. “In the dream, he was instructed to put jingles–tin lids to tobacco cans or food cans–take the lid, curl it into this bell like shape, and then attach that bell to a dress. The instruction in the dream was to attach the cones to the dresses and have the dresses danced and it would be this healing sound that would help the child get well.”
It is believed that the medicine worked because the dance was shared with other communities.
“It's really important to recognize the relationship between sound and healing, dancing and healing, community and healing,” Watt added.
A circular perspective on life.
Strong medicine as well for a contemporary pandemic.
Chicago, IL, United States - October 14, 2018: Night shot of The Field Musem, one of Chciago's ... [+] landmarks and a popular toursit attraction.
Nearly 10 years ago now, Watt had another presentation of her work in Chicago. In preparation, she researched the Indigenous history of the area.
“One of the things that strikes me so significantly about Chicago is that anywhere there's water on the planet, and especially in North America, you can't help, but know that was an important hunting (and) agricultural space for Indigenous people,” Watt said. “The thing that is in some ways devastating to reflect on is that in this place we now call Illinois, and Chicago in particular, there's not a single federally recognized tribe in the state of Illinois. That tells you a lot about the history of relocation.”
Lake Michigan forming its northeastern boundary, the Mississippi River its western, the Ohio River its southern and the Wabash River its southeastern, Illinois was shaped by water. Rivers and streams crisscross its entirety.
Once a combination of rich forest and vast, head-high prairie with the richest soil on earth, today’s Illinois was previously homeland to a variety of tribes. The southwestern part of the state was home to Cahokia, one of the largest Indigenous cities anywhere in the Americas.
But, as Watt mentioned, today, the Land of Lincoln is one of only 14 U.S. states without a single federally recognized tribe calling it home. Conversely, during the Urban Indian Relocation Act era of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, another effort by the federal government to disconnect Native people from their land and culture under the guise of “progress,” Indigenous people from around the Midwest were incentivized to move to Chicago by the thousands.
In the fall of 2023, the Center for Native Futures in Chicago will open a dedicated gallery space exclusively for the display of Native American artwork. Nothing else remotely of its kind exists there.
One of the Center’s founders, Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez Pueblo), serves as Community Engagement Coordinator for Chicago’s Field Museum’s Native American Exhibit Hall. The Field Museum is one of the largest and most prestigious museums in the world.
She was instrumental in guiding the museum through a decades-overdue reinterpretation in 2022 of its Native North American Hall. The Hall was shamefully outdated and previously presented without any input from the Indigenous people whose story was supposedly, inaccurately, and prejudicially being told.
The update constituted a defining moment in museology and the now prevalent invitation of Indigenous people to partner with museums on exhibitions of their history or cultural production.
Yepa-Pappan’s daughter, Ji Hae, a classically trained ballerina, will be featured as part of Kavi Gupta’s programming around Watt’s exhibition, dancing amongst the jingles.
Plain Cotton Tape “Sound and healing, dancing and healing, community and healing.”