This summer at the Memphis Botanic Garden, bodiless dresses float above the freshly-tilled garden beds, as if they, too, have emerged from the same soil where plants stretch out their roots. The effect is otherworldly, a dance frozen in time as the greenery around them shifts with the winds, the leaves unfolding toward the sun. For a moment, there is peace.
“It’s more than physically seeing it, but actually feeling whatever feelings come up,” says Kristine Mays, the San Francisco-based artist who hooked and looped the wires shaping these 29 figures featured in the “Rich Soil” exhibition. “My hope is that people will experience it.”
Inspired by the work of Alvin Ailey, who used dance to uplift Black lives in America, Mays created her dancers to be “celebrations to the ancestors, to all the people who have toiled the land, specifically the people who have gone through life invisible, all of the workers that go unrecognized. And so the concept behind it is that these ancestors have now come back and risen through the soil, and they’re rejoicing.”
The dresses, she adds, have no bodies so that “anyone could be in the dress. A lot of times people will look at specific dresses and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, that’s Joanne,’ or ‘That’s my Aunt Sheila.’” In turn, the pieces become more about the collective human experience, rather than about the individual.
Even the material itself — the rebar wire — speaks to this sentiment. This kind of wire can be used to mend fences, to hold concrete in place while laying a foundation, or to stabilize railroad tracks. “It makes me kind of giddy to think that I’m using it in a way that’s kind of bringing people together and mending,” Mays says, “mending circumstances and inspiring people to look at just the fact that we’re all humans. … And one of the qualities that I like about [the wire] is that it is lasting. I know that it’ll last beyond my lifetime.”
As the exhibition has traveled from California to D.C. to Atlanta and now to Memphis, Mays says that the pieces adapt to the different environments, soaking up the richness of each location’s history, people, and culture. “As soon as I was asked to come to Memphis,” Mays says, “I was like, ‘Wow, this is great’ — just considering that so many historical things have happened here, that this is the birthplace of so many creative acts.”
To complement the exhibit’s run, the garden will host Rich Sounds on the last Sunday of each month, which will include performances and demonstrations from local arts and culture organizations. This Sunday, May 28th, will mark the first of this series, with Ekpe Abioto performing. Visit membg.org/rich-soil for more information on the exhibit and its accompanying programs.
“Rich Soil at the Garden,” Memphis Botanic Garden, on display through October 1.
Rich Sounds, Memphis Botanic Garden, Sunday, May 28, 2-5 p.m., free with garden admission.