The Giant You Know
Participating Artists:
Sarah Bergren
Jan Briggs
Elowyn Hunter
Evan Lanese
Sam Martinez
Noelle Nicholson
Olivia Mikolai Ridge
Jessica Swan
Richard Ward
The Giant You Know is a collaborative photographic and sculptural installation that considers the giant as a figure of myth, memory, grief, and transformation. Nine artists created fragments of an imagined giant from locally foraged wild clay, pit-fired using a traditional open-air firing process. Scattered through an aspen grove in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, these fragments form an archaeological burial ground partially unearthed from the landscape.
The giant is an inherently contradictory figure. Across mythologies, giants are protectors and monsters, creators and destroyers, ancestors and threats. They embody forces that exceed human comprehension. As we made the fragments, participants imagined giants as people we had loved, lost, feared, or carried with us.
The project also draws from a personal and cultural history of the giant as an American icon. My mother and her four sisters worked as “pea shuckers” at the Jolly Green Giant factory in Blue Earth, Minnesota. This contemporary giant, standing 55 feet tall along I-90, recasts the ancient giant as a symbol of abundance and nourishment. The collision between ancient myth, family history, and collective memory is central to the work.
Returned to the aspen grove, the giant's remains enter an ecosystem connected by a shared underground root system. The burial ground becomes a ritual space where myth, grief, collaboration, and landscape intersect. Here, the giant is neither fully dead nor alive but returned to cycles of decay and renewal that connect human memory to the natural world.