WHERE THE FOREST MEETS THE FIELD

In 2020 and 2021 I was an artist-in-residence at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College. During my time there, I led students and faculty on numerous sound walks in the rural landscape of Gambier, Ohio, and the Brown Family Environmental Center. We focused on senses of place, interdisciplinary listening practices, mindfulness, and connections between listening, learning, and environment. I also made many field recordings throughout the year, which became a sound installation at the Gund Gallery in the summer of 2021. An excerpt can be heard below, along with a brief accompanying essay.

Close your eyes.

Where are you? What do you hear?

Are you sitting in the prairie, in the late summer, listening to birds and wind and far off (ever-present) construction? Do you hear the chorus of insects, coming and going, each group hitting a different frequency? Do you see the flight of swallows above, circling and darting for an evening meal? Or, perhaps you hear the hoarse croak of a Scarlet Tanager, like a robin with a sore throat, just as you turn around to see him staring at you in his crimson-stained coat?

Or maybe you walk up to the pine grove and cross the threshold of trees, soft brown needles underfoot, and feel the wind stop and your eyes adjust and the temperature change -- and now you feel like you are in an architectural space, a cathedral perhaps? Do you hear the woodpeckers tapping above, a bee darting past your ear, the distant traffic of Mt. Vernon?

Are you up close to the Kokosing river? Are you in the river? Do you hear the counterpoint of gurgles and splashes and patterns of rushing and flowing and how the rocks and downed branches create eddies and pools, and no matter how long you listen it is always different and always the same?

Do you hear the raindrops hitting plants and moss and dead leaves in the woods? And then, suddenly, does the long, rich drone of an insect startle you –– lasting for a minute, two minutes –– only to stop abruptly. Are your ears continuing to ring, or is that a ghost sound, or a high pitched buzz you’ve never heard before?

Are you making yourself comfortable, sitting on the boardwalk at Givens Grove, near the centuries-old oak tree (and what is that faint industrial drone off to the north?), munching on doughnuts and drinking coffee and listening to the pre-dawn polyphony of insects and birds, all clamouring for their space in the audible world, to get their message across, to mate, to warn, to fight, to sing for joy?

Is it a chilly fall day, and as you sit down under a giant maple tree near the Church of the Holy Spirit you hear squirrels gnawing and twigs snapping and the bells signaling a quarter till and distant passers-by laughing nervously (and once again that near-constant construction)?

Perhaps you are sitting beside Walker’s Pond, still, quiet –– its own private amphitheater –– listening to the wind up high across the pine tops, and then a branch falls nearby and a vole darts across the path and dives under leaves and you swear there is someone approaching and it makes you jump?

Maybe you find yourself, after leaving Walker’s Pond and traipsing uphill, slightly out of breath and resting along a path where the forest meets the field, sitting under the protection of an American elm, and you look out across the wide field and crows echo nearby and cows and donkeys exchange words and there’s something burrowing in the hedgerows and a black walnut thuds to the ground and again you look up and out to see far across the valley and rolling hills and cotton clouds and you think, I could sit here forever?

Or, are you standing in the middle of a vernal pool, just off the Kokosing Gap trail and in the middle of an unplowed field? Feet wet, standing awkwardly, trying to be silent, so that the Spring Peepers might begin? And when they do, first it is a solo, an aria, then a duo, then all hell breaks loose and it is deafening and overwhelming and it completely surrounds you –– as you realize you inadvertently stepped right into the middle of their antiphonal amphibian choir –– and then suddenly, as if on cue, they all stop together, just like that?