Moshup’s Hand

Moshup’s Hand responds to the dramatic cave-like rock formations of Rock House Reservation in West Brookfield, a landscape shaped over millennia by glacial movement and geological upheaval. Suspended across the massive stone enclosure, the silk-based sculpture invites visitors to walk beneath it and look upward as if witnessing Moshup—the great being of Wampanoag and neighboring tribal oral tradition—reaching across the land. Composed of three sculptural elements—the hand, the ripple, and the rays—the work brings light, movement, and sound into dialogue with this natural shelter. Through this environmentally sensitive installation, Mahoney honors the enduring Native presence embedded in the land, revealing stories and sovereignties that colonial histories have long tried to erase.

About the Artist

Ella Mahoney (Aquinnah Wampanoag) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work engages storytelling as a living practice connected to land, language, and community. As a visual artist, illustrator, and educator, Mahoney draws from Wampanoag creation stories and her lived experience of Indigeneity to explore relationships between people, place, and water. Her practice is grounded in an attentive, relational process—listening to stories, landscapes, and materials as collaborators rather than subjects. Working across oil, acrylic, silk painting, performance, and oral storytelling, Mahoney approaches each medium as a different way of holding and transmitting knowledge. Stories are revisited, reinterpreted, and embodied, allowing them to shift through scale, movement, and repetition.

Mahoney’s recent work centers on large-scale silk installations that evoke the movement and memory of Northeastern coastal environments, particularly Aquinnah. She paints directly onto silk, allowing pigment to flow, pool, and migrate with the material’s natural motion, mirroring tidal rhythms and the permeability of land and sea. Installed in space, the silk becomes immersive and atmospheric—activated by air, light, and bodies moving through it—inviting viewers into a shared experience of story as something felt as much as understood.

Through this process, Mahoney builds upon Indigenous histories and legends while imagining their continuation into the future, emphasizing storytelling as an active, evolving practice rooted in care, presence, and responsibility.

Additional support for Moshup’s Hand is provided by The Coby Foundation, Ltd.