When I Die Open A Window
Sound installation
Field recordings, digital stethoscope recordings, ambient audio, multi-channel playback
2025
The boulders on the grounds of the Pollock–Krasner House are glacial erratics—granite stones carried to what is now Long Island over 25,000 years ago. Drawn to their scale and presence, Jackson Pollock excavated several from the earth surrounding his studio. After his death, one of these stones was moved to mark his grave. Years later, it was replaced by a larger granite boulder from the surrounding landscape, and the original stone was placed at Lee Krasner’s resting site nearby.
These stones are porous, holding microscopic pockets of air—breath trapped within mineral bodies for millennia. While working at the site, I became preoccupied with the idea of this imprisoned air: how long it had been held, what histories it had absorbed, and what it might mean for breath to exist without release.
This line of thinking deepened following the recent death of my grandfather and a phrase my father shared with me—that the spirit requires an open window, a passage through which it can leave the body. Breath became a central metaphor: something both material and ephemeral, contained and released, present and absent at once.
For this work, I recorded sound from the granite itself and from my own body using a digital stethoscope. These recordings are layered with ambient hospital sounds from a hospice space where my partner’s father is currently receiving care; music played for him is faintly audible within the soundscape. Together, these elements create an auditory environment that inhabits a liminal threshold—the space between presence and absence, life and its dissolution.
Through these granite stones, the work explores memory, mortality, and the unseen atmospheres that surround us. Rather than marking a fixed site of burial, the project attends to breath as something that moves through bodies, stone, time, and space—captured, released, and carried forward beyond what is visible.
Field recordings, digital stethoscope recordings, ambient audio, multi-channel playback
2025
The boulders on the grounds of the Pollock–Krasner House are glacial erratics—granite stones carried to what is now Long Island over 25,000 years ago. Drawn to their scale and presence, Jackson Pollock excavated several from the earth surrounding his studio. After his death, one of these stones was moved to mark his grave. Years later, it was replaced by a larger granite boulder from the surrounding landscape, and the original stone was placed at Lee Krasner’s resting site nearby.
These stones are porous, holding microscopic pockets of air—breath trapped within mineral bodies for millennia. While working at the site, I became preoccupied with the idea of this imprisoned air: how long it had been held, what histories it had absorbed, and what it might mean for breath to exist without release.
This line of thinking deepened following the recent death of my grandfather and a phrase my father shared with me—that the spirit requires an open window, a passage through which it can leave the body. Breath became a central metaphor: something both material and ephemeral, contained and released, present and absent at once.
For this work, I recorded sound from the granite itself and from my own body using a digital stethoscope. These recordings are layered with ambient hospital sounds from a hospice space where my partner’s father is currently receiving care; music played for him is faintly audible within the soundscape. Together, these elements create an auditory environment that inhabits a liminal threshold—the space between presence and absence, life and its dissolution.
Through these granite stones, the work explores memory, mortality, and the unseen atmospheres that surround us. Rather than marking a fixed site of burial, the project attends to breath as something that moves through bodies, stone, time, and space—captured, released, and carried forward beyond what is visible.