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.
Orchard Chorus (sound art composition and participatory deep listening and co-creation experience), part 1 in June 2024, part 2 February 2025. Sound art commission “Archive Remix” funded by the Oral History Summer School in Hudson, NY and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts.
A sound artwork consisting of a community deep listening and co-recording session in an apple orchard outside of Hudson NY at sunset at the Summer Solstice in 2024 and a stereo composition of a multi-species chorus.
In June 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 I led a durational deep listening, harmonizing and group recording experience in the orchard, followed by some listening to the soil beneath the trees (via contact mics). The chorus uses field recordings from this experience and moves from the ground up: from the liquid, bugs and organisms in the soil beneath the trees, to the grasses, the trees, leaves in the wind, to the human bodies, breath and voices gathered on the ground in the grass, up to the birds in the sky and then a final layer of the chorus — the sounds of the voices, bodies and rhythms of the individual memories and reminiscences that arise during deep listening as well as the collective memory of the community and the land are represented by the archival recordings.
A two-channel version of this composition premiered in the same orchard in winter 2025 in a ceremony inspired by the tradition of wassailing, in which apple trees are honored and serenaded to encourage them to awaken from their winter slumber and produce another bountiful crop.
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.
