Marguerite Humeau’s wind flute, a part of the larger Orisons earthwork installation, with the Sangre de Cristo mountains and the Great Sand Dunes as a backdrop.
If you’ve ever spent time in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, then you know what I speak of when I say there is magic there. I’m not alone in believing it’s some kind of an energetic portal. As the largest alpine valley in the world, it’s also an incredible destination for natural beauty, and bountiful hot springs to soak your weary soul in too. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that artists over the decades have descended upon this valley, as a place to create and to find inspiration from the land. French sculptor Marguerite Humeau is one such artist, who, with the help of Black Cube Nomadic Museum and land offered from Jones Farms Organics, recently installed the largest earth-based work ever created by a female artist. Covering 160 acres of unproductive farmland, Orisons is comprised of 84 kinetic and interactive sculptures that pay homage to a land that is rapidly undergoing desertification - a bellwether of sorts for the rest of our climate change-plagued world. “Orisons means prayer,” states Humeau, but “it also sounds like ‘oree’ in French, which means ‘the cusp, the edge, the periphery.’ Orisons is about resilience, transience, life and death. Life as a gust of wind, the fragility of our existences.”
The repurposed theater marquee in Saguache, Colorado
I had the privilege of joining some friends for the opening of Orisons, and immediately felt the gravity of what her work was speaking to, as someone who also owns a generations-old farming business that’s been impacted by climate change (yep, that’s my other hustle folks). Along the way we also managed to dip in at our favorite of the valley’s hot springs, Valley View, made new friends in the town of Saguache, and connected with some other resident artists in the town of Center. All in all a pretty special trip, hence the need to document it for you here.
The VIEW from Valley View hot springs at sunset.
Taking in Humeau’s work is definitely something that will require another trip back in order to process everything; there is a complex framework of interrelated mythologies, ecologies, and imaginings at play here. Take, for instance, the highly-intentional siting of the sculptures, which pay tribute to different humans and animals who lived and died there - an attempt, the artist says, “to reconnect every form of life that has lived on it, is living on it, or will live on it in the future” (as divinated by the clairvoyant geomancers that Humeau brought on for the project, no less). Or there are the wind flutes that play the notes of the sandhill cranes who migrate to the valley each year - birds whose migratory patterns have been changing as of late. Heart-like shapes are also a recurring theme in the works, but don’t mistake those for the generic valentine variety - they’re actually a nod to the shape of a local medicinal plant seed, as well as an abstracted take on a sandhill crane’s face. There’s a lot there, but at the same time a palpable sense of peace on the land too. Humeau describes her work, in part, as an “attempt to perform acupuncture at the scale of the 160 acres of fallow circle.” In this sense, she considers the land itself as an artwork, and herself as a humble host whose role “was maybe to simply give it credit for who it is as an entity, celebrate it, elevate it, and care for it.” Humble, yet inspiring, to say the least.
Adam next to one of 84 sculptures by Marguerite Humeau. This one she described as wearing “earrings.”
Special thanks goes to Adam Gildar for playing tour guide (and for being an early catalyst of the whole project), to Max Gibson for hosting us, to Jones Farms Organics for allowing us on their land, and to the Frontier Drive Inn for the lovely opening reception. I will be back.