Installation and participatory Art
My sound and installation work is rooted in place — both in form, with place-based installations and interventions — and in content, with a focus on land, water and themes of ecological kinship. I make work about community care; labor and birth; and, human connection with non-human beings, land and bodies of water. I’m interested in deep listening, making the inaudible audible, and prompting new ways of paying attention to our environment, including collective listening experiences in public spaces. My practice uses extended microphone techniques (contact microphones, hydrophones, ambisonic mics) and underwater videography to invite the listener/viewer into new ways of seeing/hearing/knowing a space. I am interested in making work that disrupts colonial and capitalistic understandings of land and water as entities subject to our control and/or as potential sites of resource extraction, and which prompts us to remember our place within ecological systems and to reimagine the stories we tell ourselves about the natural world.
Tree Songs (sound art composition and participatory listening and co-creation experience), part 1 in June 2024, part 2 forthcoming, winter 2025. Sound art commission “Archive Remix” funded by Wave Farm and the Oral History Summer School in Hudson, NY.
A community deep listening and co-recording session in an apple orchard outside of Hudson NY at sunset at the Summer Solstice in 2024. I did an artist talk on deep listening, we tasted cider by Greenpoint Cidery made from the wild-grafted apple trees we would visit, then we did a durational deep listening, harmonizing and group recording experience in the orchard, followed by some listening to the soil/trees (via contact mics). I’m now mixing the recordings we made during this session with excerpts of materials about apple farming from the OHSS archives. The final composition is inspired by the ancient practice of wassailing, and so will be played back to the trees in the winter of 2025 and aired on Wave Farm radio.
In Side Out Side In, (5 min 30 head-tracked spatial audio sound installation), 2024. With spatial audio sound design by Brendan Baker.
Group exhibition: In the Field II. Curated by Cannach MacBride. CRISaP Sound Arts, London College of Communication gallery at the University of the Arts London. July 2024.
This spatial audio work is composed of recordings made in my ancestral homelands in the Scottish highlands, Ontario, Bretagne, and the west coast of Ireland, and plays with the imagined distinctions we make between external/internal, real/imagined, present/past and human/non-human sounds. Using recordings made with ambisonic microphones, paired omni mics, contact mics and hydrophones, the work invites the listener into hyper-real, hybrid soundscapes that can't be heard simultaneously with our ears alone. Using the ambisonic soundfield, and head-tracking headphone technology, the listener is encouraged to move their attention between and within the hybrid spaces to listen more closely to sounds they are drawn to and find their own balance between them. The layered, tandem soundscapes oscillate between the hyperreal and the mundane, between familiarity and wonder. By capturing simultaneous perspectives of a single moment of listening, this piece highlights subjectivity, rejects traditional notions of verisimilitude and completeness in field recording and explores the impossibility of extracting ourselves from our recordings and from the environments and soundscapes we inhabit.
Three Layer Score (Participatory live improvised performance and recording of text score; radio broadcast; podcast. In collaboration with composer Elizandro Garcia Montoya), 2023. Recording, including an invitation for radio listeners to participate as well, aired on BBC Radio 4 - Shortcuts: Invitations episode - radio and podcast. April 4, 2023
Recorded live with 12 mics in Prospect Park in February 2023.
