REMAINS is an outdoor installation merging sound, poetry, and sculpture. Embedded within the sculpture is a 5 minute audio track of voices - human, avian, and tellurian. The sound is activated when the viewer comes into proximity with the installation, thereby initiating the conversation that reaches across time, species, and place.
REMAINS is made with charred dead cedar trees from the land I where I currently live; repurposed steel windows from the lace mill from my former place of residence in Virginia; 32 panes of fumed, heat distorted glass embossed with the text of Let Them Not Say by Jane Hirshfield (from Ledger, Knopf, 2020).
The audio track consists of my voice interpreting Jane's poem Let Them Not Say; the song of the recently extinct Kauai O'o bird; and the voice of a fire burning. The quality of the sound on site sound is intimate, braided with ambient sound. This one minute video reflects one complete saying of the poem while the tone of the entire 5 minute track is as a conversation would be - laced with pauses and refrains.
Let Them Not Say was first read publicly on Earth Day 2017 at the March for Science in Washington DC by Jane Hirshfield - who is also the initiator the ongoing project Poets for Science. I am immensely grateful to Jane for writing this poem and letting me borrow it. I am grateful to the Macaulay Library of Ornithology for granting permission to use their recordings of the Kauai O'o; to Morgan O'Kane for installation assistance on the grounds of Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, Tivoli, NY.
