During her artist residency in Bloomington last spring, Schenkelberg explored some of the area’s traditions, communities, and collections centering spiritual mysticism. The artist's research led her to collections of esoterica at the Lilly Library, local yoga and meditation circles, to investigate Buddhism, and to create a print inspired by the solar eclipse. During her residency, she involved students in her process of excavating local lore and histories by casting molds of historical architectural elements, which will appear in the final installation of this sculpture. Viewers may discover plaster castings of the limestone sculptures that adorn Maxwell Hall—one of the oldest buildings on the Bloomington campus—including mystical symbols such as griffins and dragons.

Also in the spring, Schenkelberg pursued her research in Scotland to experience the Rosslyn Chapel (1456), a landmark containing sacred symbols from a mix of spiritual and religious belief systems. Her encounter with the chapel, located outside of Edinburgh in the county of Midlothian, Scotland, has furthered her interest in the sacred and how it inserts into our lives across time and cultures. The chapel inspired the name of Schenkelberg's installation at the Grunwald.

"Midlothian Chapel" is an amalgamation of two installations. In its first incarnation, the installation was the chapel "Aurora," created for the outdoor sculpture park Franconia in Shafer, Minnesota in 2021. The artist with a crew excavated the site-specific work that had spent three years outdoors, to serve as the foundation of the installation at the Grunwald. The new installation combines the found histories of the materials from Minnesota—steel, wood, found material, and soil weathered over three winters—with items found in Bloomington, including barn wood, tree clippings, soil, and limestone. In fusing worlds across time and materials, the artist creates an entirely new universe in "Midlothian Chapel."

Schenkelberg envisions "Midlothian Chapel" both as a space in which to engage with contemplation of the sacred feminine and with the darkness and power of our industrial history, and as a portal. The structures are populated with goddesses from diverse faith traditions to totems originating from the artist's own personal experience, evincing reverence for family history and domestic life. The installation combines castings of personal objects, including those collected from cemeteries and domestic spaces, with those cast from architectural details carved from locally quarried limestone. From flowers, scrolls, and dragons to everyday objects, the cast relics will be encased in a glass sanctuary for contemplation as the visitor moves through the chapel. In the chapel, the relics are juxtaposed with artifacts from the industrial history of the Rust Belt, such as twisted metal, crushed wire forms, and rocks from various scrap yards in Detroit, Cleveland, and Bloomington. 

More about the artist

Julie Schenkelberg is an internationally exhibiting sculptor working primarily on large-scale installations and sculpture. She has a professional background in scene painting and has taught at the college level in fine art and technical theater. Her work uses a wide variety of materials and techniques from woodworking and plaster to ceramics, drawing, and painting.

Julie Schenkelberg Garrett Walters

Schenkelberg is represented in New York by Asya Geisberg Gallery and Materia Gallery in Detroit and is working with Abattoir Gallery in Cleveland. She is the recipient of awards and residencies such as the Harpo Foundation Grant, multiple NEA grants, the Efroymson Family Fund, Art Prize in Installation, Yaddo, Art Omi, and the Bemis Center of Contemporary Art.

Her work has been exhibited in museums, art fairs, galleries, and non-profit spaces, including UNTITLED Miami, the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Burke Prize Show at the Museum of Arts and Design, NYC, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and Projeckt Normanns, Norway. Schenkelberg serves on the board of The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, Ohio. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts, from the School of Visual Arts in New York and a BA in Art History from The College of Wooster, in Wooster, Ohio.

The artist splits her time between New York City and Cleveland and frequently moves for months to a year at a time to yet other locations for site-specific projects and residencies, a nomadic lifestyle that correlates with the interrogation of the domestic sphere her work evinces. Using the home as a playground for formal and conceptual subversions, the work aggressively disrupts cohesion within the physical sphere. Familiar furnishings rekindle memories or premonitions of collapse, suggesting both the utter destruction of war, calamities, or urban decay, but also the uncanny juxtapositions of fragile substances such as cloth and china with industrial materials such as rusty metal, heavy concrete, and tool-made marks such as drilled holes and saw marks. Her current focus is bringing the sacred in these spaces forward by exploring materials and culture.