Listening Devices

Wire Basket Experiments

This year I’ve been working towards creating a group of sculptures that could hypothetically conduct sound and pick up on phenomena from a physical environment. This subtle mediation of information models how I encounter living spaces over a duration and how I try to access information about my family’s history. These wire sculptures are in progress shells which will eventually be animated with contact mics and transducers. For now they exist as static objects.

Gramaphone, 2025, Brass wire

Listening device for a tree near beechwood blvd, 2025, steel and aluminum wire, cotton thread, Digital photo print

In These iterations, I thought about the sandy and grainy quality of my grandparents photo albums. A nearby beach weekend looked much more mysterious in the clipped square frames. I kept returning to a piece of architecture in the background, some new-england tutor completely eaten by vine and framed in such a way to become a looming stationary creature, the figures in front (maybe my grandmother) naive to its threat. In the photographs, the vine looks like static, and covers the structure in a uniform sheet. The window resembles a mouth, and the scene feels muffled. These photos are inadequate to reconstruct the relationships between my family members and my connection to them, but that doesn’t prevent me from taking them as hard evidence. I can’t help but see motives similar to my own when I imagine my grandmother and grandfather passing the camera back and forth and documenting each other, the water, the plants, and this building. The result of looking at these photos without the individuals to contextualize them is something dampened.

Pear Muffler, 2025, Steel wire, cotton, mohair, and wool

The woven basket is made radially. It resembles a radio dish before the rounds are manipulated further. With alternating fiber and wire, its potential to transmit vibration is diminished. It acts more like hair or a blanket, cushioning the stiff material. The structure itself also splits into two, creating an inside and outside layer of weave. This models the vine and the architecture beneath it, and makes a new structure from what I could glimpse in the original photos.

THis object could be:

As a basket (something to carry important materials)
As a head (kicking around independent of a body)
As a fruit (with a fleshy inside, like the few drawings of apples and pears I inherited from my grandmother)
As a dish (to catch frequencies, or move them around)
As a fabric (a hard surface fighting to be soft)