Life You Like A Prayer 2024

Life You Like A Prayer 2024

Embroidered shroud – macro photography transfer on reclaimed, pigment-dyed fabric, branches, leaves, butterflies, bird nest, feather-made bird, clay frog, soil
Installation size variable

Building on the idea of conversations between the known and unknown, possibility and stagnation and ultimately life and so-called death, this installation features a shroud as its focus.

The 226 x 112 cm l 89 x 44 in fabric piece is made from well-worn, reclaimed bedsheets hand-dyed with graphite and pigment, photo transfers of macro-photographed decaying plant-life hand-stitched with silk backing. It is suspended away from the wall and draped in front of a collection of tree branches, dried leaves, butterflies, stones, a bird nest with sleeping bird and a single clay frog who also appears to be sleeping.

Close to four hundred dots were embroidered with turquoise wool, spelling in braille the following lines from a poem by 13th-century mystic poet Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi.
‘I have come to drag you out of yourself and take you in my heart. I have come to bring out the beauty you never knew you had and lift you like a prayer to the sky.’

For me, these words encapsulate what it means to really see beneath and beyond the surface of our lives; to hold space for grief, loss and vulnerability; to embrace with all our senses the living and that which has passed on from the material world yet is held precious in our living memory.

Photography by Toni Hafkenscheid & the artist