The Inspiration

In the summer of 2025 I visited Belgium. While there, I noticed that two cities, Antwerp and Bruges, had many statues of the Virgin Mary and Child tucked into niches hung over doorways and on street corners (see accounts of Corner Marys and their fascinating history here, here, here, and here). Inspired by these public devotionals, I began to wonder: was there a way to democratize them? To make similar devotional niches available to anyone, but opened up so that individuals could fill them with their own personal symbols of worship? What if that devotional, that wall altar, could be made out of cheap, plentiful scraps, like cardboard boxes? What if trash could be transmuted into literal objects of devotion?

I’ve created two wall altar designs, one squarer design and one curvier design, available below as SVG files, so that now anyone who wants one can make a wall altar for themselves! These designs are flat–intended to be laser cut, ideally out of clean recyclable/biodegradable materials like cardboard shipping boxes and then constructed like a little 3D puzzle. The altars are empty– you are encouraged to fill them with symbols, images, or effigies of things that move you, things you love, or things you’re grateful for.

The link at the button below will take you to a Google Drive folder, where I have offered files for both the curvy and the square design, created for a standard cardboard thickness — .16 inches (about 4mm). In the future I may be able to offer other material thicknesses as well, and if I am able to do so, they will also be in the Google Drive folder. You’ll want to find your nearest publicly-available laser cutter with an 18×24 inch cutting area–they can often be found at maker spaces, universities, MIT Fab Lab locations worldwide, and are sometimes even owned by private individuals. Don’t be deterred if you have to take a short introductory class in order to use it!

You’ll find a set of instructions in the Google Drive folder as well–let me know if you found them helpful as you constructed your wall altars. The instructions include a few suggestions for how to edit and finish your altars, but you are highly encouraged to find your own path!

“But I really can’t find access to a laser cutter nearby! Isn’t there some way I can cut one out by hand?,” you might ask. OK, yes, you could probably cut one out by hand, if you were to say, print out the SVG on to some paper, and then glue that paper pattern to some 18×24 inch clean corrugated cardboard. You could then use an Exacto style utility blade and some time and patience and cut out a box. My advice for you would be to use the square box design, which will be much less complex to cut!

When constructing the wall altars please remember that these are an art project by a human being: I am still in the process of iterating on the box–honing the designs and ironing out all of the wrinkles. In particular, I’m still working on the way the roof attaches to the back piece of the square boxes. Right now the holes on the roof pieces don’t align especially well with the side wall tabs–you may decide to omit the roof holes altogether if you wish.

Artists who are already familiar with vector editing software, such as Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator, are welcome to edit the basic altar designs however they see fit prior to laser cutting–these simple designs are intended to encourage personal customization, just please be sure to share your edited files publicly (and with me!), as the files and all objects made with the files are protected under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, and are not permitted to be sold at any time. When creating your own box, consider elements like material, size, pattern, and how you’d like to highlight the thing(s) you put inside, based on your interests and the resources you have around you.

If you create a Corner Mary Wall Altar please contact me and share photographs of your amazing art! I love to see what you do with them, and what you choose to put inside them!

Thank you to Kyle Steely for his help with all the teeny annoying detail edits, and for creating this 3D rendering of the wall altars! (if you’d like to 3D print a wall altar you can download that file here!) Thank you also to Kyle and Eli Meister for their extremely hard work on the material thickness file generator.

Thank you to my partner Aral Olgun for early beta testing and creative engineering suggestions, and for being so enthusiastic about creating a few of your own “waltars.”

Thanks to my Towson MFA committee members Tonia Matthews, Jenn Figg, Jack Livingston, and Bridget Sullivan for their good natured participation in my wall altar building workshop, and for their feedback on the first draft of my instructions.

Thanks to my good natured, enthusiastic friends who endured a surprise altar making session over the holiday break, and to all of the artists willing to create a Corner Mary and loan it to me for my thesis exhibition in fall 2026 (and those who would rather keep theirs private, too)!

The Corner Mary files offered on this website are protected under the Creative Commons license, and may not be sold, in their original form or in any edited forms. If you create any derivatives, remixes, or versions of the project you must also share those files under the same license.

Corner Mary Wall Altars © 2025 by Erin Barry-Dutro is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International