Installation, found objects, Korean mosi fabric, cotton yarn, 2026



In the summer of 2026, I was given an opportunity to intimately immerse myself in the tidal rhythm of the Lower Hudson River, a 153-mile estuary with a moving salt front that connects to the Atlantic Ocean. 

From my preliminary research on the Hudson River Estuary, I had an image in my mind of the river and the ocean being in a horizontal conversation with one another. When arrived, I was met by a powerful storm that swept across the valley. In the torrential rain that lasted for days, I was reminded of the vertical and cyclical circulation of water not only through geological conditions but also through weather. This sense of verticality was further deepened when I learned about the Hudson Canyon, a submarine canyon carved by glacial discharge and river flows to be deeper than the Grand Canyon, only a hundred miles southeast of Manhattan. 

In retrospect, my horizontal view of the river was based on a worldview that divides the interconnected fabric of the world into separate nouns. The movement of water revealed that this was an illusion. The heavy water of the deep-sea canyon is fundamentally connected to the clouds in the air. This realization found a form through the objects I gathered during my walks along the riverbeds, which were almost always heavily hardened and divided by retaining walls, riprap (large, jagged rocks), and fences.

I found the shorelines of the tidal Hudson to be a heterogenous site where weathered plastic debris, concrete, glass, and steel barriers are seen next to the signs of an enduring ecological web—various fish, oysters, mussels, blue crabs, aquatic plants, and several bird species, despite the continuing impact of the historic industrialization of the waterway. The juxtaposition of organic and artificial (as well as native and invasive) matters in this installation alludes to the difficulty in discerning what is "natural" or not in such an environment.



This work was created during the Parent Artist Residency at the Pocantico Center by the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation.