It Sounds Like Love, 2021-2022, exhibition installation creates a place of encounter with nine Ohio prairie seeds: Wild Bergamot, Big Blue Stem, Echinacea, Little Blue Stem, Dogbane, Switch Grass, Milkweed, and Black-eyed Susan.
Guests are invited to remove their shoes, enter the space, and walk on the artwork—etched glass images produced by the sound vibrations of the unsprouted seeds, themselves. Entering calls us to connect with our sense perceptions, to feel, to smell, to listen, and to be absorbed into direct experience.
The exhibition’s materiality of glass panels nestled among traditional Japanese mats made of rice straw and soft rush grass (tatami) interweaves an auto-biography. Born and raised in Japan for eighteen years, here I also trace my maternal lineage to Ohio, and my grandmother’s professional associations with glass art, to my family’s work with glass in the automobile industry, and to hot Ohio Summers spent on the waters of Lake Erie. Each unique, primordial form visible on the glass panels was originally captured by the Japanese art of suminigashi, or floating ink, which begins with 22 concentric circles of deep, black ink (sumi) floating on water and, here, moved by the sound vibration of the seeds.
It Sounds Like Love is a veritable act of reciprocity and a response to the damage we have done to mother earth. It is an offering that encourages us to listen deeply as we walk among the seeds’ messages that enshrine us, the intelligence of our more-than-human companions. If we linger long enough, these nine local seeds will teach us many things about ourselves.