For the past decade I have made work about climate change, registering its slow daily pressures and impact on the environments we inhabit. With Helene, the watershed I came from became the site.

I began filming the area around my hometown in 2019, with a majority of the footage being developed in 2023. I documented the same sites within a day of the storm in 2024 and continued the documentation at home in the months to follow.

In editing, I am considering how climate change rewrites the meaning of older images. The place no longer exists in the form it had, and the same systems the work attempts to sense have introduced new urgency in how I perceive home. Heat in an already hot place, infrastructure failure, and displacement now press into ordinary life. Images in the video may document the land, but the sound and dialogue within present deeper social and systemic conditions.

“Hanging Valley” presents an edition of erodible flexi discs of layered Arctic field recordings, a record player, and new sculptures and media developed in 2023 and 2024. The installation is the most recent presentation of an eleven-year body of work that began at sea during The Arctic Circle residency program.

When you visit the gallery and press play on the player, you contribute to the slow erosion of the sonic archive. After a disc has finally ‘melted,’ another one is taken from the stack and placed on the player. The discs propose an archive of ecological change that erases itself with repeated touch.

The installation centers on a reclaimed eight boat named Patsy, a racing shell measuring approximately 60 feet and weighing just over 200 pounds, that stands in five sections beside massive grounds of elevated sand. The boat's footplates have been re-built as speakers that follow a line of cables on the wall, and a single channel video projection of dry ice and environmental footage is mapped across three projectors onto a canvas screen.

I found Patsy cut in half by the side of the Augusta Rowing Club while riding my bike the back way out of town, around 15 years after I’d raced her down the Savannah River as a member of the city’s rowing club. The boathouse manager was glad to clear the discarded shell; he offered me other boats, which I did not take.

The work is about how a body moves through a landscape, within athletics and within ecology, and it is a metaphor for how we come to know ourselves through time, whether through training, climate or a return home.

I arranged contact microphone recordings taken in the Arctic Circle into a two minute and fifteen second score. I was interested in giving this sound a physical form that could be activated, so that the recordings could be played until they erase themselves. In my research I found the phonautogram, an early method of visualizing sound developed by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in the 1850s, which inscribed sound vibrations as a visible line. Using Processing and Python, I converted my audio file into a vector-based drawing that could be read by a laser cutter.

I first made paper discs that could be played with a sewing needle and a megaphone, and then made PVC discs that play the indexed recording. Every play in the gallery stresses both the disc and its recording, so that the index of the Arctic grows harder to hear and harder to read over time. Roughly 480 of the original 500 discs remain.

This life-sized intermedia installation reflects the scale of a boat hull. In September of 2013, I boarded Tall Ship Antigua just off Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen, Svalbard, with two cameras, a field recorder, a waterproof journal, a bag full of zip ties and a body-scale meteorological kite.

As a member of the Arctic Circle Residency program, I sailed from the Greenland Sea side of Norway, into the Arctic Ocean and toward the magnetic North Pole to capture video and sound from my kite, from sea ice and glaciers, and from what I encountered while hiking up the small islands of the Barents Sea and Franz Josef Land.

As I navigated this arc, I also began to confront how my roots in the Southeastern United States, far from the Arctic Circle and shaped by its own climate patterns and environmental challenges, informed my understanding of what I was witnessing.

In 2013 - a time before drones and in a place where helium doesn’t float - I zip-tied a GoPro to a meterological kite and flew it off of our ship in the Arctic Ocean. The camera flew for just over 2 minutes before the mainstay of the kite broke, causing the entire rig to fall to its death. This sculpture contains a welded steel basin, salvaged video and rocks.

Letters is a media installation that reframes the letters and drawings I sent and received over a ten year period as a life sized journal within a box truck. As I navigated my own relationship to home, chosen family, and my own LGBTQ+ identity, these letters became small symbols of the relationships that grounded me.

Metal balls on the floor ‘home’ to magnets within the floor after they are pushed around the box. A Kinect’s infrared sensor scans in visitors and connects to a Processing sketch which re-draws their depth from the lens as a bitmap image on the back wall. Data from this translation is never stored. By focusing on in the moment action the projection allows us to see ourselves as active in the conversation of the work.

Climate asks for sustained attention over many years, holding time in ways that everyday, instant media are calibrated to miss. The everyday and the long cycles of climate both work on sites that are themselves in transit: glacial ice, eroded rock faces, ocean surfaces, river seams, desert stone. The scale of the subject asks for forms of attention that don't fit neatly into my iPhone's camera roll. Climate in this sense is not an object to be measured, but a relationship between us and the systems that we inhabit. 

The tools I use and the instruments I build are often subject to what they record. They register climate by undergoing it, not by keeping a safe distance. In this work the record is made of the same vulnerability as the place it holds.

Pink Slips Analog was a shared studio space in downtown Augusta, Georgia. Artists working in the space hosted monthly events which promoted collaboration, community and non-commercial opportunities for artists and non-artists of all ages.

// Events suspended due to Covid-19

Both the world’s most northerly Cold War frontier and one of two Russian claims in the Arctic, the small coal mining community of Pyramiden supported several thousand people at its height before suffering economic hardship in the 1980s. This video documents the site as it was preserved by the arctic elements years after it was abandoned, just before its restoration and re-use.

This installation consists of a wall scale video generated from layered environmental data and painterly effects created in the Processing programming environment.

Hike Theory re-imagines a collective view of global ecology by transforming the museum into a real-time, color based weather system. Our relationship to climate and to our actions are re-framed through live data visualization, soundscapes and networking within the space of the museum.

Big Wave is a proposed tour of the city of Suqian, China. The installation utilizes sustainable, light construction to transform preexisting bus terminals into interactive animation galleries which reveal the history of each site in terms of a water narrative when they are activated.

// animation + programming Marianna Williams, site plan Moya Sun

Paintings created by milling GIS map data onto physical forms.

I rebuilt toys into radio receivers to intercept the electronic sounds in my city to reframe my understanding of home.

Collaboration by Sonya Rademeyer (performance), Dina Christiaan (performance), and Nkosenathi Koela (sound) in South Africa’s Northern Cape. Performances signal acts of restoration that work to dismantle colonial violence and which advocate for healing in the land. Videography and editing by Marianna Dixon Williams.

The Sound & Soil project acknowledges and respects the Khoe-San of the Northern Cape and the deep spiritual attachments to their ancestors and relationships they have to the country of South Africa and its peoples.

Visualization and play help us understand the relationship between mind and body. Viewers pedal a bike generator to activate a series of stop motion animations which are meant to ease the fear of crashing during an actual bike ride or race.