Prayer Rugs

2024

Mixed media installation: photo collage, gold leaf, tourmaline, wood, digitally manipulated prints; 19’ x 9’x 2’

Prayer Rugs: Call of the Earth

"Prayer Rugs" is a multimedia installation: collaged images of ecologically threatened land are set against a gold ground, highlighting the transmutation of the everyday earthen to the precious. A call to prayer to the earth. For mutual care and healing. The land(scape) is a repository concealing and preserving our history and future. “Prayer Rugs” is a call to protest environmental destruction. And it is an offering: a call for reckoning and reconciliation, reflection and mediation. “Prayer Rugs” invite transformation through connection with the earth, threading human and nonhuman energies with the land’s spiritual vitality. It considers our enmeshment with the earth, asking: how are we altered by the environment we have altered? The rugs invite one to the ground, and to the alchemy it offers. The “envelope collage” (work in process) actively invite exchange: from one visitor to an anonymous other. Leaving messages, drawings, responses.

“Prayer Rugs” derives from Ahmad’s Unearthing Stories From The Core series. Broadly, this international project expands Ahmad’s work on the effects of racialized land displacement in Oklahoma. Unearthing… links what is often positioned as a colonial social ill in the United States to the international arena. Unexpectedly aligning the rural US and Pakistan reveals geographic majesty and immense trauma absorbed by contested land and its inhabitants. With an understanding that the land carries multiple burdens, Unearthing Stories… acknowledges histories of global indigenous habitancy, colonial settlement and violence, and current climate disaster.

Made with support of James Ratterree & Liz Dueck. Photos of installation by Melissa Lukenbaugh. Tulsa Artist Fellowship Studio.