Since time immemorial, humans have sculpted sacred symbols into stone or formed them from clay. Expressing beliefs, worldviews, and spirituality in physical objects like votives and shrines is a way to imbue power and venerate deities and the natural world. For artists Chenlu Hou and Chiara No, ceramics is an enduring conduit to explore spirituality and storytelling.
Hou and No’s work will be exhibited together in a duo exhibition titled What the Hands Remember to Hear, which opens next month at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. The artists showcase objects that take on a sacred quality, emphasizing ceremony and customs while considering how cultures change and merge over time.
Hou’s colorful sculptures draw on her Chinese heritage, “blending folklore, remembrance, and the layered experiences of diaspora and cultural hybridity,” the museum says. “Chiara No creates chiming bells that personify idols, demons, and goddesses inspired by ancient, pagan, and Christian mythologies.” And for No, characterful sculptures embody myth and allegory, influenced by terracotta figures from ancient Boeotia, a region of south-central Greece.
Playful—slightly cartoonish, even—Hou and No’s sculptures are contemporary gestures of time-honored beliefs and cultural traditions. Both artists incorporate painting into their works, with tiny tableaux enriching the surfaces.
For example, Hou’s “Tian Gou Shi Ri – The truth about solar eclipse and how to observe it using pinhole imaging principle” depicts a giant female dog biting the sun with an image of a woman holding up a large object shaped like an eye—perhaps a viewing device—on its front leg. The piece draws on the Chinese legend of tiangou, or “heavenly dog,” which is said to eat the sun or moon during an eclipse.
No’s figures focus on mythological beings often vilified in literature that she researched across a range of historical time periods and media, including medieval folklore, Renaissance prose, and Elizabethan grimoires. Her pieces take the form of bells, with each figure’s legs dangling like a pair of clappers—a clapper is the “tongue” inside a bell that hits the edges to produce sound—so when activated, each sculpture creates a distinctive tone.
Hou and No’s works “resonate with themes of transformation and cultural inheritance through reimagined storytelling,” the museum says. “Their shared attention to material and mythology invites viewers into a space where living, ever-evolving storylines mirror our collective present.”
What the Hands Remember to Hear runs from January 26 through May 25 in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
