seam wick haze opens a window into unfolding metallic memories, into a chamber where steel voices resound, singing melodies that stretch beyond our memory and harmonies that engulf our imagination. Here, we are visitors in a foreign body, where metal speaks and we listen —

“ . . . because it happens that it is the echo of a place transported there where we have the gall, confusedly, to show up” (Nathanaël).

seam wick haze invites us into a topology of time and space where we don’t belong, where metals seep from the ground and suffuse our atmosphere with their slow, ineluctable subsidence. These metallic voices envelop, their stories swallow, and their bodies persist. Rooted in the soil around us, but having been mined and refined and refracted through our world, they now spin webs around us, absorbing us into the songs they sing and the stories they share.

seam wick haze explores forms of memory, narrative, and imagination that metals possess. Metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith calls this funicity, playing on the character of Funes the Memorious from Jorge Luis Borges’s famous story of a man who cannot forget any single, tiny detail of his life. Deep within their murmuring molecular structure, funeous materials record memories, histories, and archives of their every interaction with the world — from their slow genesis in nature to their industrial extraction or manufacture to their everyday usage, consumption, or disposal. seam wick haze presents metals that were extracted from seams of metal ore in the earth, and that were melted and smelted and siphoned into industrial manufacture before they were rejected and discarded for small ‘flaws’ and inconsistencies. Now liberated from the rubbish, they take new shape as  unique acoustic vessels, generating sound while also collecting, amplifying, and transmitting it. The internal proclivities of these metals become audible, breaching our own sensory plane in frequencies that render their voices fleetingly graspable. The piece, constructed primarily of reclaimed brass and steel, features a wick of steel strings stretched taut from ground to ceiling. This steel is activated by the edges of vinyl records that rotate at its base. These silent vinyl records give up their own voice, allowing human material culture to subside and give way beneath the slow accrual of material voices that vibrate in these steel strings, transmitted across spring wires to brass resonators suspended around the room, refracting these metallic harmonies into a tapestry of overtones and harmonies. As a visitor moves around the installation, these sounds evolve and shift kaleidoscopically. Though subtle, every listening position offers a unique sound world, and moving across the installation’s space brings these delicately shifting textures to the foreground.