The Chicken Chapel of Love is a sacred art project began in 2016 by Big Car co-founder, 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 cabinent 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.
The past 3,000 year since domesticating 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, ritual and most recently– life saving vaccinations.
The chicken is perhaps the most ubiquitous, overlooked creature on earth—- beautiful and essential to our existence as humans.
Commissions are on-going.
Photo by David Shalliol