May - August 2024
Totems—a fusion of past and present via portals—call upon all the senses. Discarded wood is transformed into totems to celebrate the forest’s history and honor it as part of our disappearing natural world. The totems are blackened by means of a Japanese technique shou sugi ban, whereby the wood is charred, then burnished with sandpaper and wire brushes, and finally sealed with a natural oil to create a biological yet dramatic appearance and texture. “Leaf Speakers” and a “Trunk Subwoofer” invented by Odland, play a haunting soundscape created by stretching a 1-second call of a Carolina Wren into a long “Song of Disappearance”. The scorched wooden parabolas focus the sound of the leaf speakers into beams emanating from the “Totems”, cutting across the garden’s landscape.