The Crying Mountain is a sound and video installation that calls for the audience’s participation by engaging in a collective ritual of memory and mourning. The installation consists of six reels of Super 8 film and recordings of matching poems. It depicts the mythical evocation of a fictional woman saint, gestures addressing the liminal space between life and death, subjugated landscapes, but also practices of mending the earth, offering a poetic visual metaphor for loss.

The ritualistic gesture accompanying the installation invites the audience to write a note to a deceased loved one on a seed-embedded piece of paper and bury it in a pile of soil in the gallery space. I bind myself with the audience through a social contract as the installation operates as a constant exchange. Pinned on the wall is a handwritten letter to participants where I promise to replant the notes they have entrusted me with in nature so they can bloom.

Transforming the gallery into a provisional space of communion for strangers, this installation offers a moment of mental rest, for one’s pain to be acknowledged and shared, and a suspended moment of introspection when we can take the time to think about and speak to our dead.

Exhibition view of The Crying Mountain as part of the exhibition Small Talk (2024), SP/N Gallery, Dallas