The Prayer Tent for the Divine Mother is the manifestation of the vision of artist, Denise McMorrow, on behalf of the 13 Sacred Beings who hold space within the Tent. In late 2019, Denise began creating life-size paintings of these Sacred Beings, all faces of the Divine Mother, and recording their messages. To amplify the healing, inspiration and support these Beings offer, they are gathered together in the circular container of the tent to concentrate their Presence, Beauty, and Mystery in a physical, sacred space. The Prayer Tent is a sanctuary space that invites you to rest, pray, and drop down and in to your sacred self as you are. For more information about the Prayer Tent, please visit www.mountaintomountain.love
The 13 life size paintings of Sacred Beings are faces of the archetypal Divine Mother which hold the sanctuary of the Prayer Tent. Each hold their own message. For more information on this project and series, please see www.mountaintomountain.love.
Amplifying the Mapping the Dream Life of the Central Northside Community in Pittsburgh, PA. The dreamplace Project was a public art project by artist and Northside resident, Denise McMorrow, that was commissioned by City of Asylum Pittsburgh with generous funding from ArtPlace America and technical assistance from the Pittsburgh Office of Public Art. The project acknowledges and encourages curiosity about the collective dream life of the Central Northside community by facilitating attention to dreams. Participating neighbors anonymously contributed a narrative and word/phrase from their night dreams. The public artwork was installed in the Alphabet Reading Garden from 11/15/15-01/15/16, at Commonplace Coffee on the Northside from April 2016-August 2016, and at the Firewalk Pittsburgh Event in Allegheny Commons Park in the winter of 2019. The project included an evolving psychic map of the place using neighbors' dream words that tells an otherwise invisible story of the place.
When City of Asylum Pittsburgh commissioned me to create a temporary public artwork in the Northside neighborhood of Allegheny City Central, also known as The Central Northside, as part of COAP's evolving Garden-to-Garden Artway, I wanted to create a project that would carry forward the organization's transformation of ordinary spaces of the neighborhood into passages for the imagination. As a neighbor myself, my family and I had been greatly enriched over the past several years by City of Asylum Pittsburgh's creative place-making through artistic envisioning and engagement. This creative place-making has been especially vibrant along Sampsonia Way, where the house publications of several past and current writers-in-residence line the street and speak to passersby of the stories, understandings, and worlds that the writers have brought with them from their own lands. Walking along this street in the neighborhood, one encounters images, languages, and hospitality to difference that can shift our awareness of what is possible in this particular neighborhood that we call home, and what is possible as a community that orients itself around a stance of openness.
In conceptualizing my own project, I was particularly inspired by the existing house publication called "The Pittsburgh-Burma House." After coming to Pittsburgh, the Burmese exiled writer and resident of this house, Khet Mar, had a dream in which her home in Burma began to merge with her new home in Pittsburgh. Her husband, the visual artist Than Htay Maung, depicted her dream as a mural on the facade of their house.
For me, the depiction of a night dream in a public space awakens our awareness of an aspect of our consciousness which, in our contemporary American culture, is typically not given the space nor language to explicitly cross over into visible, "ordinary" day-to-day life. But, out of the shared visibility of Khet Mar's vivid dream, I began to wonder, what else is being dreamed in this particular Northside neighborhood, and might there be a way to amplify that activity in a respectful way that honors and deepens the community's connection to each other and the place through communal attention to our dream-life?
This question about the dreaming life of a community is not a new one for traditional cultures, for whom dreams of community members have been vital bearers of messages for not only the individual, but the community as a whole. Indeed, the dreamlife of a community in traditional cultures often signifies the health of that community. As a powerful example, the 40,000 year old Aboriginal Dreamtime gathers the ongoing, participatory relationship between ancestors (human and more-than-human alike) in the creation of the world, carried forth by the sacred practices of which dreaming is a vital part.
My own artistic effort, The dreamplace Project, will trace my question of "what is being dreamed in this neighborhood?" in a way that seeks to engage neighbors' interest in their own night dreams and those of their community to spark curiosity in this aspect of the psychological life of oneself and the community as a whole. Through the encouragement and facilitation of dream-work in the community, I hope to poetically amplify the typically unarticulated and invisible activity of night dreaming in this place, and support neighbors' creative connection to this inner resource and to the place itself.
Whereas many traditional practices around dream-work focus especially upon the images within dreams, this project will work primarily with the language that neighbors hear in dreams and use in telling their dream stories. Similar to the understanding that dream images are over-determined in meaning, this project will also respectfully take up neighbors’ language about their dreams as saturated with meaning that participants themselves will be empowered to explore.
Neighbors in the community were invited to anonymously submit a dream narrative and word or phrase from their dream here. The dream narratives and words/phrases were used to create a public artwork in the neighborhood that honors these otherwise invisible stories of the place. This website will continue to host a digital dream map of the neighborhood that maps the psychic life of the place based on submitted dreams.
Path, 2008
Discarded/Unwanted Books
Path is a site-specific, 250 foot-long outdoor installation at The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts that deals with the relationship between books that are somehow considered obsolete or unwanted and our own mortality as human beings. Evolving organically across the natural terrain of PCA, Path is an invitation to those who follow it to meditate on the narratives and knowledge contained within these books, the poetics of physical decay and our own fundamentally ecological aspect, and the threads of writing and burial that connect us all. All of the books used for this piece were "weeded" items from the collections of local libraries that had set them aside to be discarded or recycled.
In the Jewish, Muslim, and oftentimes Christian traditions, holy books are treated like physical bodies, so that they are buried instead of destroyed when their owners die or when they are no longer being used. Jorge Luis Borges often wrote about the physical quality of books and how their decay mimics that of the body, and the tenuous line they serve to connect us to who we are as humans: the discoveries of the past, the evolution of knowledge, the development of language, etc. Without books, where would we be? Yet, with the increasing digitization of knowledge, and the sheer scope of writing that exists, there are always books that become orphaned, obsolete, or unwanted. I am interested in dealing poetically with these books as objects that each once served the purpose of its own small compass of human thought, emotion, and meaning. Collectively, they become a pathway that evolves organically, implicitly asking “Where, indeed, are we going?” My hope is that visitors will follow this path of spines as an opportunity to engage with the environment and meditate upon the meaning of these physical objects, so full of narratives, history, and memory, that are now buried beneath their feet.
(A)Line, 2008
Discarded/Unwanted Books, Thread, Found Wooden Chair
(A)Line is a sculpture/installation that serves as a visual metaphor for collective consciousness, the loss and retrieval of language, and the relationship of cultural memory to the individual’s act of making. The thousands of rolled and sewn pages become reminiscent of an old tree that has been cut to reveal its many rings, with its own organic topography and ecological ontology.
Annica (Impermanence), 2007
Seven Found Wooden Chairs, Graphite
This piece is a reflection upon the fundamental Buddhist concept of Anicca or Impermanence, which holds that the form of all things must arise and pass away, transforming their states like firewood to ash. This transformation of form opens the door to other possible ways of knowing and being. Throughout our lives we assume particular forms of presence that change over time (mother, sister, friend, teacher, creator, guide, etc.), but are inextricably linked and connected to that non-linear aspect of ourselves that is our truth. The circle of chairs is a poetic reference to this changing presence through the temporal passages we name as death, birth, and rebirth, in both the poetic, metaphorical sense as well as the physical and spiritual sense. This piece is dedicated to Inez Mahone who passed away on July 13th, 2007.
this world is not conclusion (after emily dickinson). vines, thread, paper, graphite.
Mixed Media on Paper
titled, 2007
covers from salvaged books, 48" x 56"
I became very interested in the way that many people inscribe their books with their names or thoughts. The marks became like the fingerprints of previous owners of these objects who once loved the stories or knowledge they held. The books without writing then took on a kind of ambiguity that deepened their sense of orphanhood.
hold, 2007
salvaged blankets, approx. 36" x 36" x 36"
This nest was made from reclaimed blankets--objects which once kept someone warm and protected and also full of history.
moon, 2007
salvaged blueprints, gesso, graphite, 84" x 84"
I love old blueprints--the care and craft that went into making them is astounding. When I found a number of old USX Steel blueprints that were headed for the trash, I wanted to make a piece that paid homage to the drawings. Taking a cue from one of the plans for a circular structure, the result resembled an intricate planet.
