Sonya Clark
Edifice and Mortar, 2018
Hand stamped bricks, human hair, and glass, steel base
39 x 72 x 15 inches
Sonya Clark describes Edifice & Mortar as “a wall, a flag, and a document”—three forms that hold boundless symbolism. In this work, Clark asks a foundational question: Who truly laid the foundations of the United States? By transforming familiar national symbols into a tactile, bodily structure, she reframes the story of American origins.
The piece is constructed from hand-cast bricks, each stamped with a traditional mason’s maker’s mark (verso) and a single word (recto). When the recto (front-facing) text is read together across the surface, the bricks form an excerpt from the United States Declaration of Independence. The recto text evokes the authority and permanence of the founding document, but its physical fragmentation across individual bricks underscores the labor required to build both text and nation. The words “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” appear not as abstract ideals but as components of a literal structure—suggesting that these promises were materially constructed, unevenly distributed, and historically denied to many.
Between the bricks, Clark replaces conventional mortar with tightly packed African American hair collected from salons in Richmond, Virginia. Hair—a material deeply tied to identity, ancestry, and embodiment—introduces an intimate and visceral presence into the architecture of the piece. It references generations of Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved at the nation’s founding and whose bodies fueled its economic and political growth. By using hair as binding material, Clark asserts that Black labor and Black lives have quite literally held the nation together. At the same time, the hair’s compressed form suggests the weight and pressure exerted by systemic racism—Black people “held under the weight of the system,” yet simultaneously sustaining it.
Each brick is also stamped with the word Schiavo, the Italian root of the common greeting “Ciao.” Translated into English, schiavo roughly translates into “slave.” This linguistic trace links everyday greetings to histories of bondage, reminding viewers how the legacy of enslavement permeates language and culture in ways often undetected. The maker’s mark—traditionally a sign of craftsmanship and pride—becomes instead a mark of possession, echoing how enslaved people were branded and treated as property.
The installation’s blue reflective panel is angled so that viewers see themselves within the work. This gesture implicates the present: the wall is not merely historical but contemporary. By catching the viewer’s reflection, Clark collapses the distance between past and present, asking us to consider our relationship to the structures that continue to shape the nation. We are not outside observers; we are part of the edifice.
Edifice & Mortar functions simultaneously as monument and critique, document and disruption. It honors the unacknowledged labor that built the country while confronting the contradictions embedded in its founding ideals. Through brick, human hair, language, and reflection, Clark transforms the language of nation-building into a meditation on memory, power, and belonging.
-Writing by Amy Raehse is the result of multiple conversations via phone and email between Sonya Clark and Amy Raehse over the course of three years (2019-2022.)
