Interactive exhibit ‘It Sounds Like Love’ captures nature
A microphone that’s powerful enough can capture the sounds of dry, dormant seeds — soft soothing, rhythmic popping that might conjure up the notion of Earth’s heartbeat.
Those sounds are ever-present in “It Sounds Like Love,” an unusual, interactive exhibit continuing through April 27 in Otterbein University’s Frank Museum of Art.
French-american artist Cadine Navarro, who is based in Paris, was born in Japan and has lived in seven countries on three continents — and she has connections to Ohio. Her grandmother was a glass artist in Toledo.
For “It Sounds Like Love,” Navarro recorded the sounds of the dormant seeds of nine indigenous Ohio prairie plants including black-eyed Susan, milkweed, dogbane and echinacea. Then, through the Japanese marbling technique of Sumi Nagashi, she created nine different three-by-three foot images, each swirls that represent the sound of the seeds of one of the plants.
Navarro then transferred the wavy images from paper onto glass with laser etching and placed the images on the floor of the Frank Museum of Art, alternating them with traditional Japanese tatami mats. In the dimly lit gallery, the result is a striking floor installation that can be walked on — shoes off, please — by visitors.
“It’s not a passive experience,” said exhibit curator and Frank Museum of Art Director Janice Glowski. “Cadine wanted people to come to the earth artwork on the ground … The installation is kind of quiet and dormant like the seeds, but when people come in, it breathes.”
On a Sunday in November, a handful of artists, writers, musicians and a botanist, sat on the floor surrounding the installation and considered the connections between art and science, and the languages of the Earth and humans.
Navarro, speaking to the group via Zoom, said that the project “moved me into how to communicate with more than the human world.
“I’ve always been looking for a language not connected to geography,” she said.
The installation brings to mind the 2021 book “Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest,” in which author and scientist Suzanne Simard writes how trees in forests function in cooperative networks, in effect communicating in a language different than humans but achieving some similar results and to the benefit of the forest denizens.
As viewers take in Navarro’s artwork, the onomatopoeia sounds of the seeds continue softly in the background, a reminder that all expression in this world is not necessarily human.
Throughout the run of “It Sounds Like Love,” Glowski said, a variety of events — all open to the public — will be offered. For more information, go to www.otterbein.edu/art/frankmuseum/.
negilson@gmail.com