“I had the seed of an idea, from back in 2022, of doing something in a hoop house, because the acoustics of a hoop house and the experience of being with plants and sound would be interesting.”

When Emily Duncan Wilson ’17 was working at Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan after graduating from Yale University’s School of Drama in 2020, she couldn’t have known that the brief thought of how cool it would be to do a sound project in a greenhouse would lead her to where she is today: unveiling her sound installation in Lyman Plant House at her alma mater's botanic garden. 

“Over the last couple of years, I’ve just gotten tired of doing late night work, inside, for a long period of time. So I made it a goal for myself this year to do some sort of sound work, in a space other than a dark theater at night,” Wilson said. “I figured that this would be a really nice base and place to explore doing that, within an educational institution that wants to support that kind of exploration.”

 Wilson graduated from Smith in 2017 with a bachelor of arts in music and theater, and has since worked various jobs, from a role in residence life at an educational non-profit to doing freelance sound design for theater productions in Seattle and New Jersey. Eventually, the fatigue of freelance theatrical sound design encouraged Wilson to relocate to the Northeast, and ultimately brought her back to Smith. 

“When I got hired on as a postdoc MFA faculty, I reached out to the botanic garden in the fall. I was like, ‘Can I do a sound installation? I don't have an idea of what to do, but I would like to do something and use that as a creative goal for myself, to create something here,’” Wilson said. 

Conservatory Curator Jimmy Grogan and Associate Director of Education Sarah Loomis welcomed Wilson’s idea and showed her around the garden in search of potential locations for her project. The botanic garden has a long history of fostering artistic exploration centered around plants, nature and the environment—from the annual Spring Bulb Show’s student art installations to exhibitions by the Botanic Garden Student Educator (BoGSE) team. With the support of the botanic garden staff, the seed of Wilson’s project planted back in 2022 finally started to sprout.

“I met with Sarah first, and then Sarah and Jimmy, and we just walked through the space and talked about what I might want to do and what I was interested in exploring,” Wilson said. “We were originally going to do the installation in Fern House, because I've always been really drawn to that room, and then we quickly realized that it’s not a conducive room to put tech, speakers or power in because the plants need to be wet all the time.” 

Despite the small setback to the original plan, Wilson quickly pivoted: “Jimmy suggested Succulent House, which I had enjoyed looking at, but had never really had a deep connection to—but doing this project has fully changed that,” Wilson said. 

The location might not have been exactly what Wilson had originally pictured, but she quickly came to appreciate the new environment in which she was working. 

“As somebody who grew up in New England, I don't have any experience with the desert, and I feel like most of the natural work I've done in the past has been like, ‘I love New England, I love the sounds of lakes and forests and things in this ecosystem.’ So this was a really interesting challenge for me—like, all right, you know nothing about the desert. You know nothing about these plants,” Wilson said. “I wonder if that's the case for some of the visitors, too, that they're like, ‘Oh, this is the dry house and I want to see the pretty palms.’ Getting to learn about the species in Succulent House, how they function, what they represent, how they survive, and hearing Jimmy almost get emotional about how wonderful and resilient these plants are—sharing how diverse and lush this room actually is—really helped me reframe that.”

Looking back, Wilson can reflect on how much her relationship with Succulent House—and dryer, desert plants in general—has changed. But at the time, the learning curve required some adjustment. As she began to figure out the concept and logistics behind her piece, she went through a lengthy process involving research, questioning, experimentation, and lots of time in Lyman. 

“Once we had set Succulent House as the location, I just visited it a lot, and then researched different cactus survival tactics. I learned the difference between cacti and euphorbs, their different structural and geographical locations. I learned that the spikes on a cactus are called spines, which is important to the title of this piece,” Wilson said. “And as I learned more about how they grow and how they survive and what they have to do, I was like, ‘Well, this feels pretty relevant to what we have to do right now, in our current climate.’ And I considered, how I can lead a visitor to think about the plants and how they survive, and how that visitor might also be inspired by these plants to do something in their life?” 

With these questions swirling around, Wilson gradually refined the concepts she was working with into a cohesive story about desert plants—one of existence and endurance, especially during strenuous periods when subsistence is crucial to life.

“I came up with the two sides of how they survive and how they are resilient, and that's the idea of savoring resources when you have them. So, if it rains, they absorb as much as they can, they keep it in their fleshy parts in the core part of their bodies. And when they have enough water and sun and whatever they need, they can produce flowers, but then those flowers or leaves often become the spine of the cactus that then are like this aggressive survival tactic, too.”

Beyond plants, though, Wilson wanted to explore how these themes of survival and resilience can be applied to and adopted by people as well. She considered how methods of survival can, at times, be as much a resistance to the forces that work against you as they are simply means of staying alive.

“Even as I was loading in, I got scrapes on my legs just because of leaning over [cacti], so I thought that was a really interesting idea; that savoring is sort of a tactic for resiliency and psychological wellness for humans, too,” Wilson said. “So the idea that you have to savor your reserves when you have them in order to create spines and have that aggressive survival tactic, that felt sort of apropos to ways that we have to savor what we can in order to push back when we have that ability to.” 

Once she better understood how desert plants work in terms of biology and resource conservation, Wilson set about creating a soundscape, a musical representation that she felt conveyed these feelings and ideas about survival and resilience.

“I play instruments, so I recorded myself playing clarinet because that felt cactus-like—you have to have breath and moisture to make a clarinet sound, and it's sort of columnar, and it has this warm, woody texture to it. So I layered tones that sounded ‘nice,’ or lush, for the clarinet,” Wilson said.  

In addition to capturing the feeling of the plants and their methods of survival and resilience, Wilson wanted to incorporate sounds that emulated the feeling of the somewhat harsh, dry desert landscape that these plants inhabit.

“I don't really play violin, but I got one from a thrift store a couple months ago, and the idea of bowing felt like a spine—the bow just feels spiny—but also the fact that you have to make sound through friction of the bow,” Wilson said. “And so the violin notes come a little bit out of tune, then become a little more in tune as they're played. Sometimes there's tremolos, which are supposed to mimic the wings of beetles that would live in that area.”

“There's some synth bed-type things from software instruments that I played around with first before I had recorded the clarinet or violin. I wanted them to sound sort of granular, either sand or wind-like,” Wilson continued. “But they also feel kind of twinkly, in places, but I think that helps that overall lush feeling—that it's not just arid desert, the desert isn't just the sand forever, there's all of this plant life that I hadn't really been aware of. So there's these layered synths that sort of blossom.”

With the musical elements coming together, it wasn’t only the synths that were blossoming, but also her installation that had begun to bloom. As she put the finishing touches on her recordings, Wilson played around with how to loop the soundtrack so that it could run continuously during the whole of the botanic garden’s open hours. She knew she didn’t want it to be one singular looped track, and risk repetitiveness if visitors lingered in Succulent House. To avoid this, she worked out a system that involves looping certain recordings separately, then overlapping them so that the sound wasn’t a constant static piece.

“The clarinet and violin always run together, and will always loop as one unit, but the environmental soundscape is separate and loops on its own, and the synth lush bed is separate and loops on its own. So there's an element of organicness to it,” Wilson said.

After setting up the sound equipment in Succulent House, the installation was finally complete, providing the room with a new ambiance. The work could not have been more different from the work that she was doing before, surrounded by nature and entirely self-directed as opposed to the dark, indoor and collaborative working environment Wilson had been a part of previously in theater sound design. As the project went live, Wilson reflected on the process, expressing her gratitude to those who helped her see her creative idea through.

 “When I was doing the walk-throughs, both with Sarah and Jimmy, they were always so generous with their time and willingness to support this, which has been really lovely,” Wilson said. “I feel like I've both had a lot of freedom and a lot of support, and that rocks when you're making art in a place.”

Wilson’s sound installation, savor/spine, will be running in Succulent House at the botanic garden through June 1. Visitors are invited to tune in and listen while they stroll through Lyman, and consider the desert plants growing there as well as how we, as humans, might be more similar to these plants than we think. Resilient.