Allison Janae Hamilton’s practice blends land-centered folklore and personal family narratives, addressing the social and political concerns of today's changing terrain (including land loss, environmental justice, climate change, and sustainability) through the lens of cultural myth making. Her source material includes folktales, hunting and farming rituals, African-American nature writing, and Baptist hymns, which she engages as meditations on disruption within the rituals of natural and human-made environments. The peo-ple cried mer-cy in the storm borrows its title from a line in Florida Storm, a 1928 hymn written by Judge Jackson about the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. The installation, continually activated by the weather conditions of its environment, contemplates the way in which climate-related disasters expose existing social inequities, and how affected communities contend with both forms of devastation.
Allison Janae Hamilton’s practice blends land-centered folklore and personal family narratives, addressing the social and political concerns of today's changing terrain (including land loss, environmental justice, climate change, and sustainability) through the lens of cultural myth making. Her source material includes folktales, hunting and farming rituals, African-American nature writing, and Baptist hymns, which she engages as meditations on disruption within the rituals of natural and human-made environments. The peo-ple cried mer-cy in the storm borrows its title from a line in Florida Storm, a 1928 hymn written by Judge Jackson about the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. The installation, continually activated by the weather conditions of its environment, contemplates the way in which climate-related disasters expose existing social inequities, and how affected communities contend with both forms of devastation.
