Andover Mending: Healing & Reslience

In partnership with the Andover Center for History & Culture, with funding from the Andover Cultural Council  Cazimi, a creative collaborative of artists Emily O’Hara, Molly Foley, and Morgan von Prelle Pecelli, have created a public art installation expressing themes of healing and feminine resilience. This treasure box installation consists of wood, fiber and metal elements  inside the three community windows in front of CVS on Main Street, Andover, MA.

For this installation Cazimi considered how the spider embodied the creative, feminine energy, and reflected the long history of women’s contribution to resilience and longevity through mending. Mending, an act of repairing and healing, can be seen in the spider’s work as she weaves her web, a web that highlights light and shadow, beginning in the center, radiating out and encouraging transformation that begins within and then can radiate out into the world, in a widening circle of connectedness.

Our environment embraces the Japanese traditions of Kintsugi, bringing in larger split and broken branches and then gilding their wood fibers at the wounds with gold leaf, embracing the beauty of the brokenness and the knowledge that scars and brokenness are part and parcel of the healing process. Within this gilded woodland environment, we used fine gold metal to weave a spider web.

In order to bring an additional sense of life, mystery and change to the windows, the installation will be activated one final time on April 30th from 5:30-8:30 pm. The subtle, strange performance will be its own call to re-examine life as it is, explore darkness and transmutation and re-engage nature and our humanity in new and perhaps more meaningful ways. Each activation will last 3 hours, giving passersby the opportunity to observe for as long or short an amount of time as they like.