Skywalker/Skyscraper (Register),

2020

In 2009, I moved from Portland, Oregon, to Brooklyn, New York. The conifer trees and totem poles of my Pacific Northwest upbringing were replaced by skyscrapers and scaffolds. I became fascinated by the mythic and magical spaces that towers occupy. For four years I kept a studio in Gowanus–coincidentally, where Haudenosaunee ironworkers and their families settled in the 1950s. Haudenosaunee iron workers are called “Skywalkers,” an acknowledgment of the heights they reached while creating iron-forged skyscrapers and bridges. With a beam of iron at its core, this sculpture considers the human preoccupation with reaching higher realms and the long multicultural history of getting there. Skywalker/Skyscraper (Register) is also a registry of sorts, as many of the blankets hold personal associations. In some Native communities, blankets are given away to honor people for witnessing important life events, births, and comings-of-age, graduations and marriages, namings, and honorings. The emerging I-beam shows how blanket stories are, in many ways, the backbone of our humanity.

Marie Watt, artist