Artistic Intentions | Research Statement
My artwork involves encounter, exchange, and sensory inquiry. Examples of my projects include a walking performance about lithium mining, an overnight camp for broadcasting the dawn chorus of birds, and an experimental documentary featuring food heritage stories called Shoebox Lunch.
In my projects, the audience listens, walks, or even floats while engaging in a series of sensory experiences and group meditations. People are invited to slow down, reflect, and reconnect to the layers of human and other-than-human life, usually in an urban landscape. Audiences may learn about the history of the land, speculate about ecological futures, and confront climate anxiety, among other outcomes.
Drawing attention to the ways that human culture and geography are entangled shifts the audience’s ability to notice, witness, and transform these intersections. In my recent Water Radio performances (funded by an Ellies Creator Award from Oolite Arts) participants are invited to play a water conductivity sound circuit, taste sea plants, make rubbings of mangrove bark, and feel the resistance of water on their skin.
In my artwork, I cultivate artistic connections to place through a critical social practice of expanded landscape studies, prioritizing Indigenous philosophy over seemingly similar thought systems such as object-oriented ontology or the legal movement called “the rights of nature” which questions the popular belief that nature is a resource for humans to own, use, and abuse.
The most important teachers for my multisensory experience design have been the disability community and contemplative and somatic practices. In addition to practicing mindfulness meditation, anti-colonial methods provide guidance for my creative research. This long-term learning process began with listening to the elders of the Onondaga Nation and the Partnership for Onondaga Creek in central New York, where I produced an eco-art project called Up the Creek! from 2007 to 2008.