Objetos Sagrados / Sacred Objects: An Essay by Laila Islam On Olaitan Callender-Scott And Carolina Marín Hernández
Objetos Sagrados Sacred Objects
An Essay By Laila Islam
On Olaitan Callender-Scott And Carolina Marín Hernández
In August of this year, I woke up one morning with a persistently loud thought in my mind that said “go visit your Aunt Lynne, and do it as much as you can.” I’m so glad I listened to that thought the moment I heard it. I had heard from family members that she was sick, but I had no clue about the severity of her condition until I saw her for the first time in the nursing home. After that first time, I visited her almost every Wednesday with my grandmother. I had no clue that within a couple of months later, my Aunt Lynne would leave this earth forever.
At her funeral people celebrated her life with dance, loud cheers, and cries. The air was filled with remarks about how she was full of love and how she shared her love with everyone. They talked about her food and how she would cook and care for everyone’s child. People that attended the same church as my Aunt Lynne raved about her devotion to her church and how powerfully she would praise the Lord. They said she would scream! They said there were times when she would throw down her cane to stand in prayer and praise! It made me wish I could have seen her on a Sunday at church. They said that despite whatever pains she might have felt that day, she felt HEALING in those moments! It was probably in those moments that my Aunt Lynne smiled the hardest, moments where she glided on the floor with ease. That spiritual transcendence provided her strength, resilience, and healing, through pain. From the accounts of her fellow church members, it seems as if it helped her through everything.
I wished for the opportunity to have witnessed her in such spiritual transcendence. Still, a wave of gratitude washed over me when thinking of how she so powerfully and graciously shared her healing prayers to me and so many others throughout her life, in vessels of food, and in the action of caring for me and so many others as children. Her food was a sacred vessel of love and healing. A consumable vessel, one that takes skill to conjure, one that is tangibly shared and dispersed communally. It was a skill taught to people in our family like my dad who now runs a diner. The sanctity she shared held our families together, we stayed in a close-knit community through her food, through her taking care (which, the action of care is then sacred too) of everyone’s baby, which provided my cousins, my siblings, and I a love-filled experience of growing up and knowing each other since birth.
Objects become sacred when they possess a prayer that heals, a love that heals, and the suffering that evokes a need for healing. Our objects as Black and Brown people hold both our methods of joy and our open wounds caused by systemic violence. The works of Sacred Objects are testaments to what vessels created and shared amongst Black and Brown people hold or possess and how they affect others. The works of Carolina Marin Hernández and Olaitan Callender-Scott present each respective artists' vessels of joy and pain that offer resilience to those who engage with them. The materiality of each work presents this dichotomy of trauma and love living together in one body, in a co-existence that I consider resilience.
In Callender-Scott’s Legacy and Strength, two figures made of soft felt sit in a glass box. One figure holds a small circuit board, while the other has nails and screws that hold onto its body. The rusty nails and screws are pierced through the surface of its felt skin, these nails trace the perimeter of the subject's torso and shoulders, and we can see exactly how these nails remain latched onto the figure's skin. These subjects and their nails, screws, and circuit board double as vessels of resilience and representations of how our pain inhabits us and how we hold onto pain. Hernández also uses material to convey a warped dichotomy between soft love and hard pain. Cobija de Culitos greets those who enter the space with a raised arm, a smiling face, its head and back covered in a ceramic blanket. The guardian is warmed by a cold and hard blanket, holding onto the rigid “cloth” in a similar manner that the figures in Legacy and Strength hold onto their own objects. I see these works as vessels in which Callender-Scott and Hernández share their own healing and pain-filled prayers. While Legacy and Strength offer humanistic representations of this experience, Callender-Scott’s Unnamed Ancestors and Untitled are more literal sacred vessels that hold objects semi-visible to the viewer. These objects are too wrapped in a web of soft felt, holding traces of both love and suffering.
In Sacred Objects, both artists offer and share a strengthening love by creating objects that possess rhythm and an intrinsic human connection. In Eco Y Tambó one long trail of braided corn husks is arranged in rows, bent at corners, and joined by thread displayed as a cumulative blanket of braided cornhusks. Fleshy and earthy hues of reds, purples, pinks, greens, and browns find themselves in a rhythmic dance between each other, as the corn is weaved in and out and connected and bent and joined together. Callender-Scott’s Fiber Prints, her photographs of tattered wool and other fabrics, sit adjacent to Hernández’s cornhusk blanket. These photographs share similar hues that move in a similar dance, the materials fold inwards and outwards in the confined dark squares. Hernández and Callender-Scott engage in a practice of creation, assembly, and presentation that offers viewers an opportunity to witness resilience in tactical rhythm. The rhythmic dances possess a love; through weaving and assembly, I believe the artists are offering healing prayers.
The artists’ offerings possess a level of humanness, regardless of their form, that viewers are invited to access and engage with. Eco Y Tambó invites us to touch by looking, to visually feel the process of braiding each corn husk into each other in each groove and dip. The human hand and care-filled touch are present in every sacred object on view. We’re also encouraged to meet these offerings where we are: Marín Hernández and Callender-Scott provide us with vessels of resilience in a variety of sizes, some intimately small and some large, vessels placed in enclosed glass boxes and directly on the ground, occupying the space as humans themselves. Through different levels of approachability, Sacred Objects invites viewers to develop a human to vessel-of-humane-experience connection, which, because of the experiences these vessels hold, to me, offers people a connection to divine methods of resilience.
These sacred objects and their open invitations to love do not take away from how Hernández and Callender-Scott are specifically using vessel creation as a means to negotiate, evaluate, and express the distinct experience of existing in violent colonialist states as a person whose ancestors have historically, and who they currently, navigate the world as diasporic peoples. Figurines Que bochinche and Sos un cañengo are duo forms, each pair holding each other in an embrace, one has a large grin, while the other frowns. In both works, the duo forms melt into each other to where their limbs are only distinguishable by the different forms' contrasting colors. These characteristics, along with the figurines’ cheeky names, invite us to consider how Brown and Black people exist in duo bodies, partly a historically dehumanized, commodified, and violently exploited body, and a body capable of laughter, pleasure, and happiness.
While I wished my aunt could have lived her last days on earth in joy and pleasure, I take some comfort in knowing that her divine and healing love now remains in sites like my father's hands when he cooks, imbued in the food we share. I know that the enjoyment we experience when we experience her vessels of care and love will provide my Aunt Lynne’s spirit with a fulfilling joy and pleasure that transcends tangible human experiences. I take a deeper comfort in remembering that the sacred objects she knew how to make, and the care she knew how to give, were passed down to her. Through her vessels of love and care, I’m not only experiencing her love and resilience, but generations of love and resilience that was offered to her mother, and her mother's mother, and will in time be offered to my future children and grandchildren. This knowledge allows me to grieve with peace, knowing that I hold both suffering and powers of care, love, and joy all within me and that through creation I can offer the healing power of resilience to myself and others. My Aunt Lynne’s sacred objects that hold a divine love offer me healing in this time and show me the way.
Laila Islam (they/them) is a curator and multidisciplinary artist in Philadelphia. Islam graduated from Moore College of Art and Design with a BFA in Curatorial Studies and minors Fine Arts and Photography. Islam identifies as a curator committed to artistic community engagement and radical healing. Their passion to intersect curation with community mobilization is reflected in their work as co-curator and collective organizer of The Future Is Us Collective.
Philadelphia-based artist Carolina Marín Hernández was born in Cali, Colombia and raised in Queens, New York. Her artwork explores and rejects the monolithic identification of Latinidad, instead celebrating the identity’s multicultural roots through performance-based work, weaving, and sculpting. She uses decorative ceramics, vibrant colors, and woven corn husks to construct large-scale sculptures imbued with animism and humor. As a first-generation, formerly undocumented person, Carolina pulls from her experiences, experimenting with language, form, and material, to rethink identities imposed upon her. Hernández earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Moore College of Art and Design with a concentration in 3D Media and an interest in Fibers.
Art explorer and guide Olaitan Callender-Scott was born in Brooklyn, NY and currently resides in Oakland, CA. Curiosity and love of color and texture energize and drive her work. As a descendent of Africans living in the diaspora she continues to look for ways to honor the life of her ancestors and bring forward their legacy through her life and art. Callender-Scott makes fiber quilts, fiber sculptures and fiber prints using both traditional and non-traditional techniques to combine media. Her practice spans photography, sculpture, printmaking, encaustic, and drawing to explore and express her life interests. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
2020-22 Grizzly Grizzly programming and residencies are supported by Added Velocity which is administered by Temple Contemporary at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University and funded by the William Penn Foundation.