A Future Inspired by the Land

There’s a family photo in the office of Khepera Lyons-Clark ’24, just off the maker space at the Barnard Design Center, where she is a Post-Baccalaureate Fellow. In the photo, she and two siblings grin and mug for the camera. It’s a typical family snapshot, though the printed medium is anything but. The image is embedded in mycelium substrate, a craggy lightweight material that Lyons-Clark refers to as the “OG of styrofoam.” 

Lyons-Clark, who majored in sociology with a focus in environmental science and visual art, created a multidisciplinary art project for her Post-Bacc exhibit in May. The work encompasses a cross section of technology and the humanities in media that includes photography, video, digital projection, sculpture, and basket weaving. 

Lyons-Clark experimented with a host of organic materials for the project, like the mycelium, a material derived from mushroom spores that form a root network. As the mycelium grows, it can enmesh paper, seashells, and other objets d’art. Lyons-Clark also incorporates dyes, some derived from logwood shavings, which create purple, and from cochineal insects, which yield red. The mycelium continues to grow until Lyons-Clark places the squares into a dehydrator that stops the fungal growth. She also incorporates invasive plants harvested from family land in Virginia Beach, Virginia, the same area where her ancestors were once enslaved and where her family now resides. Nearby is her aunt’s home, which remains a place of great joy. The tension between a harsh history and a contented present is at the center of Lyons-Clark’s art. 

“The work that I’m doing is trying to reach back and understand what my ancestors might have gone through, and that, in a way, is a form of time travel,” she says. “The more broad way to understand that is through the lens of Afrofuturism, which is about Black liberation and survival — the ability to imagine worlds outside the one you’re born in. That’s the lifeblood of Black Americans.” 

Inspired by the Afrofuturist pioneer Sun Ra, Lyons-Clark creates costumes that are at once futurist and organic. One such costume is a black cotton headdress with veil draping that conjures a nun’s habit or a hijab. But instead of an opening for one’s face, there’s a mirror. For the exhibition, which included video projections in Barnard’s Movement Lab, Lyons-Clark filmed her aunt in front of the family home wearing the headdress. As the camera records, her aunt tilts her head to reflect treetops rooted in ancestral soil. 

“The land acts as a starting point for sustainable making practices,” she says. Other objects from the project include a basket-like skirt woven with invasive vines, also harvested on the family land. Weaving with invasives stands in as a metaphor for the tension between her people and the land, between modernity and the environment, and between the past and the future. 

“But what builds a basket is tension,” Lyons says. “It’s what keeps the basket together.”