North Church Articulates Matthews Island

2020

Sound Art

During my StudioWorks residency at The Tides Institute & Museum of Art (TIMA), I hiked the region collecting site specific audio field recordings of Eastport, Maine, the Passamaquoddy Bay, and areas surrounding the Bay of Fundy. For this piece, I crossed the sea floor to collect audio field recordings. Matthews Island is a 14-acre preserve off the coast of Eastport. At low tide, the island can be accessed by crossing an intermittent sandbar. In the Bay of Fundy, tides average 18 - 20 feet, pulsing twice daily. Low tide created a path, allowing me to cautiously traverse the sea floor in pursuit of field recordings. Located in the town of Eastport, the North Church (built 1819) is a 4,000 square foot project space in the care of TIMA. Using the field recordings I collected on Matthews Island as source material, I created a cycle of playback / recording in the acoustic chamber of the North Church. Through this process, my field recordings of seasonal birdsong morph into abstraction as the architecture of the church articulates the echoes of the original field recording.

Listen to an excerpt below.