On “One Word”: A Sound Art Project

In 2005, I spent a summer at the Headlands Center for the Arts in California. On an old army base just north of San Francisco, the Center feels like a secluded island despite being close to a large city. The resident artists had run of the place, and even though I had the entire gymnasium as a studio, I spent just as much time outside as in.

I began hiking the trails that surrounded the base. I walked among Eucalyptus trees as they rubbed together in the wind to sing their eerie (and pungent) songs. I roamed the old concrete fortifications buried into the hills looking East across the ocean, and took naps in human-made divots in the grass; perhaps they were remnants of a military plan to hear the enemy as they approached. I also walked along the shores of the bay, where the sounds of the waves and ocean were new and exciting to someone who grew up in a land-locked Midwestern city.