Sarah
Nance

Marseille tidal gauge aria is a vocal shroud composed from tide level data collected over the past 130 years from a tidal gauge in the bay of Marseille, France. I converted each yearly average tide level into a note within my vocal range and set the resulting atonal composition to a poem from Rasu-Yong Tugen’s Songs from the Black Moon. I perform the piece operatically, drawing on the genre’s propensity for magnified human emotion; the rising sea levels in the bay can be heard in the increasingly higher pitches of the aria.

Beartooth star ii is a modular quilt whose colors are extractions of summer wildflowers, granite, and lichen on the Beartooth Pass in Montana. The eight diamond segments are pieced together from mylar, a material associated with both space exploration and temperature regulation.

In points of rupture, I translated cryoseismic events into knitting patterns through a process that resembles coding. Cryoseisms, or ice quakes, occur in glaciers due to calving events or pooling meltwater. Like melting glaciers, knitting has an intimate relationship with dissolution in its ever-present threat of unraveling into formlessness. The letterpress prints in points of rupture push the structure of knitting to a point of failure, reveling in the form’s inability to contain a seismic event.