The hawk, able to see the “un-seeable,” is the messenger of change landing, reminding us of our potential. By reaching back to our ancestors, or deeply understanding our own personal legacy, we may carry the old forward to a higher evolution.
Ancestral Plane is part of the "Spiritual Ground" mixed media photo collage series (1996-2000). These intricate collage images are made from photographic cutouts with occasional found imagery or drawing added. On average, I've layered 25-40 separate contoured fragments to create the effect.
Original Medium: photo collage (33 pieces)
Print Format: variable media
Dimensions: multiple sizes
"The work of the mixed media artist Alyssa Hinton, of Tuscarora and Osage descent, continues the theme of unseen peoples and unseen worlds existing beneath or within Indigenous earthworks. Her vibrant photo-collage titled Ancestral Plane, part of her Spiritual Ground series completed between 1996 and 2000, depicts a burial mound constructed in the deep past and now overgrown with trees not as the site of death, colonial nostalgia, or raw material for scholarly careers but rather as the site of Indigenous rebirth and regeneration. In her artist’s statement, Hinton describes the image as “the cross section of a burial mound, breaking open to reveal remnants and remains of cultural relics and people. Trees draw upon these vestiges for sustenance while the embryo also is fed to support its new life (re-awakening/re-birth). The hawk, able to see the ‘unseeable,’ is the messenger of change landing, reminding us of our potential.” In Hinton’s Indigenous and gendered script, the ancient burial mound is more seed than sepulcher; when conditions are appropriate, it opens of its own volition, rather than be opened by desecrating looters or archaeologists, to reunite upper and lower worlds. And it is this seed, represented in the central figure of a blue human embryo, that enables contemporary Indigenous communities to realize the power of their erased, revised, or rewritten potential, perhaps to rebuild their worlds and thus to script their lives anew."
-Chadwick Allen (excerpt from Re-scripting Indigenous America: Earthworks in Native Art)
Chadwick Allen (Chickasaw ancestry) is Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and Professor of English at University of Washington. Author of the books Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and New Zealand Maori Literary and Activist Texts and Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies, he is a past President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and editor of the journal Studies in American Indian Literatures.