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Fall to Flight

Fall to Flight is an installation of approximately 600 origami swallows suspended by invisible thread. The project can be traced to July 2005, when I wrote a poem about grief, and the image of letting go was a thousand paper birds taking to the sky. Holding hundreds of prayers in my hands, written on nearly weightless paper – a material that bears the weight of countless strangers with burdens too heavy to hold up high – I wondered if I should avert my eyes and fold the prayers into birds unread. But anonymity told me I would not break anyone's confidence, so I decided to read every prayer and meditate on each one as I folded. I had no idea the effect this would have on me. And so, I found myself praying for hundreds of strangers.

You would not look up at a sky of paper birds to imagine its contents: the mothers, the fathers, the children, the homeless, the sick, the struggling, the dead and the dying, the sisters and brothers, the prayers not for hand-outs, but for jobs. Secret prayers are scrawled in pencil on black paper, barely legible. Here are the prayers of people who struggle within a society that renders them invisible day after day, looking for a moment of kindness in a world that can’t seem to make eye contact because its too afraid to see the truth. There is a culture of turning away from real suffering – a blindness linked to fear, prejudice, projection and a sense of entitlement that seeks to justify the refusal of moral integrity. It is not possible to be selectively blind; you lose sight of beauty when you close your eyes to pain.

People who have a lot to pray for really know how to pray. I wanted to hold them. I thought about how it might feel to be God, given these words. I thought about the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and wondered if it is made stronger by millions of prayers tucked into the stone. The motion of a million synchronized bodies folding to Mecca has to change the rhythm of the air. I made this installation, but it isn't mine. So it doesn't really matter what my intentions are. What I learned tying birds to the sky bears repeating, though. There is too much hope for doubt to look on emptiness.

- Alison Dilworth

I would like to thank Bill Golderer and the Broad Street community for trusting me with this space, Dayton Castleman, Wendy Gaynor and Julie Woodard (for hours of mime-sewing and being women), and Kayti Didriksen (who risked her life building scaffolding with me, and all those hours we spent painting and bonding). A big thank you to Gregory Carafelli, photographer extraordinaire.

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