Interactive site-specific installation with salvaged timber/debris, household objects, field recordings, vocals, proximity sensors, and a seven-channel transducer array.
Written libretto available.
First installed at the Transverse Range Art Showcase at Burns-Piñon Ridge Reserve, Yucca Valley CA, May 2025.
Many thanks to Reed Wixson for his help with the install. All images are my own or courtesy of Hiroshi Clark, Artifax Photography.
Program Notes
Burning Bush (2025) is an interactive installation work, featuring a sound-sculpture with both live and prerecorded elements. The main form of the sculpture comprises an assemblage of salvaged timber, with various pieces in different stages of industrial processing and/or deterioration.
The sketch below is a concept diagram for the installation of Burning Bush in the “workshop” space at Burns-Piñon. The main part of the sculpture can be seen in the centre, with its contorted cholla branches unfurling from the central form; upper branches are framed by a plate-glass window view of the rocky ridgeline behind the workshop. Most of the materials used to create Burning Bush were salvaged from the Burns-Piñon site itself. Before we could begin restoring the workshop space (including aforementioned plate-glass), we had to remove piles and piles of debris, from bits of wire and splintered timber to jars of nails and rusting propane tanks. This refuse was strewn over the sandy hillside behind the shop, ready for scavenging by sculpture vultures. One particularly gnarled old cholla was framed beautifully by a pile of rotten fenceposts and a disintegrating bookshelf. Taken together, it looked burned out; I imagined that the chollas’ ashen bark was the cadaverous aftermath of a long-extinguished biblical “burning bush.”
But instead of figuring the bush as a threatening, didactic vehicle for deistic instruction, I began thinking about how to reimagine the cholla-assemblage as a contemporary, non-theistic oracle. I began imagining what an oracle wrought from bits of broken bush and box might say. How would it realise its message — how might it sound out its place? What if the plant itself lent its own materiality and experiences to a dialogic, more-than-human encounter? How might different timbers coalesce into a multispecies being, where contingent environmental factors (e.g., wind, sun, temperature) influence how the encounter proceeds? What if the emanating single voice became a collective chorus — one seeking not to command or intimidate, but to express and discuss?
In Burning Bush, the raw cholla is juxtaposed against other timber derivatives representing varying levels of human-industrial intervention. All materials are salvaged: the cardboard is flimsy, with corrugated tears; the chipboard double-bass flight case is clearly a home job, effective but imprecise; the television cabinet has neat edges and a polished finish. These elements collectively speak to the commodification of natural resources in the contemporary globalised economy, wherein capitalist logics prioritise the cost-efficient mass production ahead of concerns around provenance or environmental impact.
In this sketch of Burning Bush, the red details on the main sculptural form represent cabling and transducers, which will be placed on the sculpture to activate it as its own self-amplifying speaker assembly. There will be seven transducers, corresponding to seven channels of audio, each with a unique speaking voice (I have recorded five of these voices so far, with two to come shortly). The voices all read out the same script/libretto: an unstructured prose-poem which describes some of my experiences living in Southern California since 2022. I have edited each recording such that the overall timing of the collective, septaphonic speech is synchronised; but the cadences and expressivity within individual speakers’ phrases are deliberately preserved. I want to evoke the feeling of a group reciting a passage learned from memory, slipping in and out of time with one another as the words flow at their own paces.
The voices will also slip in and out of sounding altogether; each channel/voice will only be activated when someone approaches/triggers its dedicated proximity sensor. Only when seven people/bodies surround the sculpture will all seven voices speak simultaneously. If one person moves around the bush, they’ll hear from each of the voices sequentially as they trigger its sensor. This fragmented, indeterminate sonic presentation also characterises the other main sounding components of Burning Bush: a series of rusted cans and other metal junk salvaged from Burns-Piñon. These cans produce wonderfully sonorous tones when scraped at particular speeds across the concrete floor and wire-strung walls of the workshop. I have experimented with stringing up both cans and heavier metal refuse, using the ropes to offload their weight; the swinging of the ropes also makes it easy to establish physical oscillations, generating percussive rhythms as the cans scrape regularly across the structure.
By the time of the Desert Event (October ’25), the cans/bodies will each be controlled by a mechanical apparatus (servo motor + swinging arm) that will move the bodies based on live wind-speed sensor data. The wind itself is a characteristic part of the Burns-Piñon landscape, often taking on personalities and (whistling, howling, rattling) sonorities of its own. Burning Bush directly responds to the vicissitudes of both environmental and human stimuli, taking cues from each to trigger sounding elements in its more-than-human interactivity. I like to think that the chunks of metal refuse, moving in time with the changing wind, will look something like bits of burning debris whirling, aloft, in the suspended aftermath of the tree’s extinguishment.