lydia cheshewalla

Handprints made with brown loess soil cover a white gallery wall. Some have created drips, some are light, some are dark, some are small, some are large.
A handprint made in brown loess soil on a white piece of paper. Marks with charcoal have been made in between the fingers of the handprint, on the tips of middle fingers and thumb, and radiate out from the bottom of the palm.
Sarah's hand with a finger tattoo and wearing a ring holds a piece of sage as it burns into a brass dish. This is part of a ceremony in which Indigenous medicine is burned as blessing.
Lydia bends over the brass bowl containing Indigenous medicines sage, cedar, and sweetgrass as they are being burned and blows on them to keep them going as Sarah's hand sprinkles more dry medicine onto the burning ash.
A triptych of loess soil printed images. On the left side there is a singular handprint with a long trailing drip extending from the palm. In the center are a series of footprints. On the right side are two hand prints, a left hand and a right hand.
A ground level and up-close look at a small mound Sarah built in the center of the gallery. The soil of the mound was collected from the backyards of people close to her.
An overall look at one half of the gallery, including a mound of dirt installed into the center of the room, a large canvas against a wall onto which the artists' outlined have been traced in soil, the back wall where community members added handprints
A ground level look at the mound of soil in the middle of the gallery with the images of the two artists traced in soil in the background.
An overall look at one half of the gallery, including the mound of dirt in the center, the artist prints made with soil hanging on the wall, and the back wall where community participated.
A mixture of loess soil and water sits inside of a heart-shaped aluminum pan on a pedestal. Above on the wall there is a handprint made in soil that drips back towards the pan.
A person places their hand in the heart-shaped pan containing a mixture of loess soil and water.
A person smears their muddy hand across a white gallery wall.
A child slaps her muddy hand onto a white gallery wall with so much energy that her hair flies forward with the motion.
Several brown muddy handprints and drawn flowers on a white gallery wall.
An overall image of the final piece of handprint art created by the community appears on the back wall of a gallery as a circle with a few outliers.

GROUNDING

July 8 - August 19, 2022

Generator Space

Amplify Arts

Omaha, Nebraska


GROUNDING, organized by Lydia Cheshewalla and Sarah Rowe, explores reciprocal human and more-than-human kinship systems through acts of somatic co-regulation with place, land, and earth. Introducing ethically sourced soil pigments into the gallery space as a medium to produce body-prints on site, these two artists make visible the often-invisible interdependencies of Indigenous bodies and complex ecosystems. By positing land as body and earth as archive, the exhibition considers soil’s capacity to record the body’s impressions as part of an ancestral lineage of understanding what it means to be in, of, or from a place. 


Photos: Debra S. Kaplan

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