Completion of Temple Mound Space Travelers 1 & 2 has taken place!
Temple Mound Space Travelers 1 & 2 are part of the “Ancestral Spaceship” mixed media collage/assemblage series, of which there are 12 in total. These cut out forms have a totemic or altar-like quality and expand on previous themes relating to the creation stories and seasonal cycles of my southeastern indigenous ancestors.
“Temple Mound Space Travelers 1 & 2” shows temple mounds and temple keepers, mathematicians who knew how to track the cycles of stars, sun, moon, and planets that determined the sacred calendar and traditional ceremonial cycle. Both pieces were inspired by Town Creek Indian Mound, a site in Mt. Gilead, North Carolina composed of a single large platform mound with a surrounding village and palisade. A giant sundial of sorts, it was primarily an astronomical and ceremonial site.
As was often the case during mound building times in the southeastern states, Town Creek is purposefully situated by a river and on ground that contains large amounts of magnetite (iron). In “Temple Mound- Space Travellers 1 & 2” you see winding rivers in each piece, and a rusty red-orange color palette to denote magnetite in the earth.
The red and white painted backs of the “Ancestral Spaceships” are significant. Historically in the southeast, the fundamental color duo of red and white was used to express dualities of many kinds, i.e. good-bad, pure-impure, order-disorder, chaos-harmony, war-peace and so on.”
-Alyssa Hinton
Click here for the entire “Ancestral Spaceships” series thus far:
