Marika Whitaker

WHAT HOLDS WHAT
All of the materials used in this body of work were found in my home during a period of rupture, reconstruction and transition in 2020-21. As the walls of my home came down, I began an almost-unconscious practice of picking up the pieces and tucking them into my pockets. This process evolved into a meditation on holding: how these walls held my body, my work, and how I could play with inverting what holds what. A hold is many things: a site of capture, a wait, a bind, a command. We hold a pose, hold our horses, put a hold on something, put something on hold, hold a hand, hold all the cards, hold on by a thread, hold the wall. Materially, I continued to pick up the pieces and explore the topography of the cut as well as various forms of suturing- holds for healing. Some of the pieces are tightly wound, wrapped up in thread like a cocoon, some are unsutured with no attachment at all. Some of the pieces I tried mending myself, holding them in my hands, and letting them fall apart again. I built awkward future skeletons with the broken bones of the past, the pieces of wall crumbling as I tried to pin them down, a delightfully absurd exercise in mapping, marking, & memory. All of these Heartifacts exist in various states of suturity on a threshold of becoming and unbecoming: operating both as contemporary relics and a tender new syntax for these broken-down times. 

BIO
Marika Whitaker is an installation and ritual artist whose work explores attachment, language and relationship as material interfaces where power dynamics play out on an intimate scale. Through a practice of ritualistic repetition of simple actions, accumulative touch points, and string figuring, she builds sentimental artifacts and relational instruments- heartifacts- that hold vibrational potential for emerging and embodied knowledge systems that value touch, feeling, connection, play, and co-becoming. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 2018 and has exhibited her installations on the north shore and nationally. Her work can be found at www.marikawhitakerstudio.com