MARY O'MALLEY

Materials: Lizella Clay, Digital Images

Dimensions: 

Each tile: 20.5” x 20.5” x 2.75” 

Installation: 29’ 3 ½” x 4’

 

       Stations comprises eight ceramic tiles that reference both the Catholic tradition of The Stations of the Cross and the eight major festivals of the Celtic pagan calendar—two equinoxes, two solstices, and the midpoints between them. The work unfolds as a linear narrative of my family and me living through the first year of the COVID-19 lockdown. Imagery of seasonal foliage from my parents’ property serves as a visual timestamp, capturing the natural world in the state it appeared during each corresponding time of year.
        The layout and aesthetic of the tiles were inspired by a set of photographs found in the Wesleyan College art department depicting relief carvings from a church in France. The photos, uncaptioned and marked only by occasional illegible notes, carried an appealing ambiguity—at once devotional and oddly comical. I adopted that same ambiguous tone as a vehicle to narrate our experience of lockdown through a series of reliefs.
Each tile depicts a moment from that year. The January/February tile, for instance, shows a relief of double-yolked eggs—a week when every egg in a carton contained two yolks. It felt so strange that we looked up how it could happen, and discovered it is a very rare occurrence and was seen as an omen of death in Norse and Celtic mythology. In retrospect, an entire carton of them felt less like coincidence and more like prophecy. The May tile highlights the amount of washing done of hands, groceries, and packages at the time, the latter now seeming a bit absurd. Another depicts swirling clouds from a late summer unexpected windstorm so strong that foliage throughout the area was burnt by salt carried in from the ocean turning them brown or orange. Transforming our green summer surrounds into a premature autumn color palette —another unnerving event in a year defined by unprecedented and unpredictable occurrences.
      The scalloped edges and deteriorating clay components draw from the architecture of my parents’ Victorian house, which is perpetually under construction. These fractured details also symbolize the fragility of the infrastructures and systems we once believed to be stable—the economic, social, and spiritual frameworks that suddenly collapsed in March 2020. While human life paused, nature carried on undeterred: spring returned, gardens bloomed, and Ospreys and Bald Eagles nested again on Long Island after years of absence. Gardening, long walks, meeting friends outdoors, and evenings at the beach became both catharsis and lifeline—a collective return to the rhythms of nature, echoing the cyclical rituals of ancient pagans and quietly filling the void left by abandoned Catholic rituals.
       Each station also includes digital images made from photographs and screenshots documenting our shared experience in lockdown. They correspond to the season of its tile and capture a moment of significance. One shows a priest in Ireland playing the bagpipes at a memorial for my cousin, who died of COVID. Another captures the line for early voting during that year’s presidential election—a particularly charged moment, with record participation shaped by both the pandemic and the social unrest of the time. The double-rainbow event occurred in Summer during pride, a big event in my town which is a gateway to Fire Island.
Like the traditional Stations of the Cross, which guide parishioners in meditating on the story of Jesus’s crucifixion, Stations invites viewers to pause and reflect. Rather than a sacred journey toward redemption, the series charts the passage of time through a cloistered experience. Standing silently before each tile mirrors the meditative stillness of that year—moments filled with anxiety, yet strangely precious. My family and I sometimes miss it, in a way.
        In Irish mythology, time is non-linear: the past, present, and future coexist, much like the concept of the multiverse in quantum physics. Though Stations unfolds in a linear sequence, it is also cyclical, echoing the patterns of nature itself. I wonder whether viewers standing before these tiles reflect on their own experiences of that time—what they were doing, what those seasons evoke, or how the political and cultural ruptures of that year continue to reappear from our pasts, shaping our present.