Photos from “Passage: Images of a Pilgrimage, an artist crosses the border with the ‘desert people.’”
Artist and University of Rhode Island alum Meave Hickey showcases her photography in Green Hall entitled “Passage: Images of a Pilgrimage.”
Hickey graduated from URI in 1970, and now resides in Ireland. After graduation, according to Hickey, she traveled to Mexico and became inspired by the culture of Latin America. Throughout her life she has found herself at the borders of the U.S. and Mexico doing different projects she said.
Her gallery exhibits a week of a Pilgrimage. She explained a Pilgrimage to be a journey, oftentimes having different meaning to different people.
This specific Pilgrimage was documenting a spiritual and cultural journey to preserve and pass along traditions.
The gallery wall reads: “Maeve Hickey accompanied about a hundred Native Americans (Tohono O’odham) on their annual pilgrimage across the US/Mexico Border to the shrine of San Fransico Xavier, walking with them in the searing heat of the day, and sleeping alongside them under the stars during the cold nights. The work in this exhibit is her responses: photographs that capture the humanity and texture of the journey in images of the pilgrims and their ephemeral shrines as well as in the often strange and surprising sights encountered along the way. Her pieces explore and reflect on the cross-boarder desert pilgrimage as an aesthetic as well as religious undertaking. If the artist is here a pilgrim, then the pilgrim is also an artist.”
“My favorite photo I think is the photo of the baby in the hammock I got, that’s an odd little story. And I think for anybody interested in photography it is sort of an example of how sometimes you have to work while you’re doing other things like combing your hair or shining your shoes or something like that. Your eyes and your mind have to be out there and you know, sort of eyes in the back of your head type of thing. I was having a taco at this outdoor stand by a river and all of a sudden I noticed from the corner of my eye this baby in a hammock slung across the river. So, I thought that’s extraordinary. So, I dropped the taco, picked up the camera ran to the river took the photo, and at the same moment, and I’m not lying, at the same moment, the skies opened and the family in sort of one move, took the hammock down, I remember seeing one arm come across because they had done this a million times. They know how to do it. And so the baby was gone because as soon as the rain hit, they went ‘oops,’ and took it down. And in the next frame, there was no baby. I didn’t know until I got back to the darkroom. If there would be any photo, because it was a mega second. And there was the image of a little baby asleep in its hammock slung across the river. So it was almost like an apparition. So I’m kind of grateful for the baby and the moment.”