PRAYER HEADS

The work that was designed to disappear

Animated sequence by Trenlin Hubbert rendering the dissolution of a Prayer Head. A life-size clay head with strong bone structure faces upward against cracked desert earth. Over the course of the animation, water channels form across the surface, the clay erodes and splits open, and the head breaks apart to reveal buried objects: driftwood, a small pouch, a vessel. In the final frames, the head is gone. Only the objects and the desert floor remain.
Prayer Head: rendering of the process. The originals are in the ground.

Life-size heads made of unfired clay with strong bone structure, faces turned upward, placed along hiking trails in the high desert outside Santa Fe.

Each one held something buried inside: stones, bone, sharks’ teeth, sea urchin quills. When the rains came, they cried. Water pooled in the eye sockets and ran around the cheekbones. Over days or weeks, each head dissolved into a pillow of clay, releasing what it carried.

I did not always witness their disappearance. I would find the aftermath: white clay where the native soil was amber. Red clay where the native soil was pale. No photographs of the original heads exist. The work was not made to be documented. It was made to be encountered and to dissolve. What you see here is a rendering of the concept. The originals are in the ground.

Prayer Heads (1989–1993) is a series of life-size heads by Trenlin Hubbert, made of unfired clay with their faces turned upward and placed along hiking trails in the high desert outside Santa Fe. Each held buried objects, such as stones, bone, sharks’ teeth, and sea urchin quills. Each dissolved in the rain over days or weeks, releasing what it carried. No photographs of the original heads exist; the image on this page is a rendering of the process. She counts the rain as a collaborator, independent enough that she had no channel for getting what she wanted.