In my final year of graduate school, I had become weary of using “virgin” materials for every new sculpture – especially when I wanted my work to directly address the damage we’re inflicting on our planet. I was talking this through with my advisor at the time, and she gently reminded me that the Earth will be fine – it’s us living creatures who will suffer and go extinct as a result of our own hubris.

The idea for this piece came out of that conversation – it’s a series of breakup letters from the Earth to humans, delivered via a driftwood intermediary. Driftwood carries so many layers of recorded history: the record of years of climate preserved in the growth rings of the wood; the record of whatever violent storm sheared this branch off from the rest of the tree, and then all the salt, sand, and bleached coloring accrued from its ocean journey.

The breakup letters are spoken; you can hear them by physically touching your head to the little copper plates – each one custom fitted to a knot in the wood. These are “bone conductor speakers,” which have no cone like a typical speaker. Instead of propagating sound through the air, they turn your skull into the resonant cavity. There are four individual channels, each playing different sections of the text, voiced by me and writer Naomi Krupitsky.

You can listen to the audio below; for a simulation of the sculptural experience of individual channels, use headphones and listen first to one ear, then the other.