Humeau addresses these competing realities through a series of sculptures that, she says, “transform a place that has been a place of extraction into a place of reverence.” A flock of seven bird-shaped sculptures invite visitors to rest for a moment in their netted wings, an homage to the sandhill cranes that migrate through the valley. Seventy-seven smaller ceramic and steel pieces, intended to look like native flora, lightly puncture the landscape; they whistle and spin at varying wind speeds.
“My big obsession, my big quest, is to resuscitate or reactivate worlds or ecosystems that have gone extinct,” says the 36-year-old artist, who is known for creating contemplative, temporal sculptures. “For many years I was thinking of worlds without humans—before humans existed or after we disappeared. But I think it’s very urgent to think about the world in which we coexist and how we do that.”
Humeau began working on the Orisons (which translates to “prayer” in Latin) project three years ago. She started by learning about agriculture and the area’s history, but also consulted with wide-ranging experts, from agronomists and a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, to the fourth-generation farmers at Jones Farms Organics on whose land Orisons sits. Those conversations inspired her to imagine a way of “reconnecting” the land’s past, present, and future in a way that leaves little trace.
if you “The intention is to connect everything—every being with every being, every history with every history,” says Cortney Stell, executive director and chief curator of Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum, which commissioned Orisons. “[It’s] intended to help folks realize that it’s not man and nature, that we are nature, that everything is sort of connected.”
Orisons is one of the largest art pieces of its kind to be created by an individual woman artist. Admission is free (the project will be open to the public through June 2025), but reservations are required. Visitors will receive a map to guide them through the property, but Humeau hopes they wander by their own compass. “It’s not a prescriptive map…it can just be an invitation,” she says. “The beauty of Orisons is that it’s shifting. It’s a landscape. It’s an ecosystem. So it’s always going to be doing its own thing.”
