The Chicken Chapel of Love is a sacred art project begun in 2016 by CAMi Director and Chief Curator, Shauta Marsh with works from artists: Nasreen Khan (pyrography altar cabinet), Julie Xiao (Fire Mother Mural), Justin Cooper, Jason Gray (design, hand carved doors, cabinet fabrication), Rachel Leah Cohn and Shauta Marsh (design and egg wall)—with commissions of art, performance, music and poems on-going. The Chapel opened July of 2023.
When you open The Chicken Chapel of Love’s hand-carved wooden doors inscribed with the latin phrase Vide cor meum (See My Heart), you’re greeted with pink stained glass windows, gilded gold candelabras, an altar cabinet of woodburnt symbols by Nasreen Khan, red velvet curtains, taxidermy roosters, warm wood church pews, wax candles.
Ceremony and ritual are foundations of modern society. The desire to create meaningful words, movements, and sacred spaces is hard-wired into us regardless of culture or background. Throughout most of human history — all over the world — we’ve integrated one animal into iconography: the chicken.
In the 3,000 years since humans domesticated chickens from their jungle home in Southeast Asia, they have served as symbols ranging from courage to cowardice to fertility, used for food, consulted by warlords to decide whether or not to go to war, used in ritual and most recently– life-saving vaccinations.The chicken is perhaps the most ubiquitous, overlooked creature on earth—- beautiful and essential to our existence.
The Chicken Chapel of Love is an act of devotion to the divine feminine — not in opposition to the world’s great religious traditions, but as a counterbalance to them. Where many of those traditions center the divine masculine and place humanity in dominion over the natural world, the Chapel asks a different question: what would it mean to be accountable to it instead? To tend to it, to listen to it, to recognize the sacred in the creature we have used, overlooked, and eaten for three thousand years? The Chapel does not offer doctrine. It offers a space — gilded and feathered and candlelit — for that older, quieter form of reverence.
Commissions are on-going.
Photo by David Shalliol
