If You Suffer, Place a Stone in Your Mouth
2026Olfactory sculpture, experimental scent, 2-channel video (6:04), audio, anthro-petrological specimens
Exhibited at NEW INC, the New Museum, New York, NY
Installation views:
This installation captured the ambiguities of the toxic sublime across sensory registers, challenging purity politics in an era of pervasive pollutants (microplastics, PFAS, heavy metals), digested by both landscapes and by human bodies in processes of mutual metabolism. This work traces connections between geophagy (the consumption of earth, clay, chalk or soil) and the artists’ search for microplastics in drinking water. These two trajectories intertwine in unexpected ways, staging how bodies consume what is typically deemed "inedible."
Though practiced on every continent for thousands of years (often to detoxify poisons and pathogens or as a digestive and antinausea aid), geophagy remains heavily stigmatized, practiced mostly by women. Contemporarily, the practice can simultaneously harm and heal the eater, as one might consume dirt from an area poisoned by industrial inputs or pollution. The many, sometimes contradictory studies about geophagy reflect the nature of ecological consciousness in late industrialisms (Kim Fortun) of the twenty-first century. Such unstable boundaries and material unknowns require a tolerance for ambiguity and discomfort; It is the eeriness which lies at the heart of the material-human ruptures of the past century. Taste and smell, however, may offer embodied insights of these phenomena.
Visitors were invited to smell the hanging olfactory piece, which marks an ephemeral residue of late industrialisms.
The title of the work is drawn from a text by Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th century polymath, mystic, and natural scientist who prescribed remedies using stones and rocks for physical ailments.
Microscopy footage was captured in collaboration with the Water Justice Lab / NATURE Lab, a citizen science lab in Troy, NY, and with Dr. Sarah Cadieux, department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, RPI.
NATURE Lab is co-directed by Kathy High and Ellie Irons, and a project of the Sanctuary for Independent Media. Soundscape was designed using field recordings of soil by Lisa Schonberg, and an original composition by Nick Kopp.
Video stills:
