Molly Valentine Dierks: The Tender Hand of the Unseen

Every night this June, people walking, biking, and driving through downtown Denver were treated to the sight of a murmuration of starlings projected on the 140-foot tall Daniels & Fisher Tower. The project is an immersive video installation by Molly Valentine Dierks (MFA ​’14) titled The Tender Hand of the Unseen — named after a line in Kahlil Gibran’s ​“On Pain,” a poem that contemplates the nature of larger forces at work in our evolution.

The work is my way of confronting a socially fractured landscape, where screens more frequently mediate our understanding of self… overshadowing more embodied connections to each other and the natural world. Projected on a clocktower, The Tender Hand of the Unseen also muses on the nature of time. Through the lens of starlings’ beautiful sculptural patterns, the projection references periods of growth and rebirth…temporality more mutable than mechanical, circular than linear.

Dierks, now a faculty member at the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Art and Art History, was inspired to create the work by a murmuration of starlings she witnessed during her MFA studies at U‑M. The project then turned into reality with a proposal to Night Lights Denver, a collection of light and projection-based art installations that take place throughout downtown Denver.

Learn more about Dierks’ large-scale installation in a June article by Rachel Sauer in Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine.