When I am feeling depressed and anxious sullen [for Sarah]
Frank O’Hara
October 2023
42°41'35.8"N 70°49'08.3"W
Four Quartets, for four trees
T.S. Eliot
March 2016-December 2019
42°35'59.5"N 70°52'34.7"W
What happens when we read poetry to a tree? Does the tree incorporate the poem into itself, changing with it? Does the poem put forth leaves and roots? ensembles (2007-present) takes seriously the perhaps nonsensical idea that poetry can alter the materiality of the universe.
Every work in this series is a sculpture made by reading a poem to a tree. The images document the before and after of this process. Contingent on the length of the poem, some works were created in only a few seconds, others took several years. These site-specific treepoems can be viewed on location at the coordinates appended to each image. The images themselves are made on a large-format camera.
ensembles is an ongoing experiment in human-aided sculpture in which the artist is just one collaborator in an ensemble of other makers. The series is also part of a long-term research into non-haptic sculpture and the relationship between sound and time.