Palimpsests III - Lentic Sequence
Photo by Isaiah Winters
Commissioned for NEW INC's fifth Creative Science Dinner at the Prospect Park Boathouse in New York (October 14, 2025), Palimpsests III: Lentic Sequence is a site-responsive olfactory installation reflecting on lost wetland ecologies. Wetlands once covered vast regions of New York and many parts of the world, flattened or overwritten by development. At this specific site, the Boathouse sits where lentic, or still-water, ecosystems once thrived. The work was structured as a perceptual threshold encountered along the approach to the Boathouse, sensed through scent before it was visually legible.
Three incense fields were positioned sequentially along the entry path, each activated with scent formulations I created. Movement I presented a cooler, more open register marking the perceptual shift between land and water. Movement II carried a denser, more saturated register associated with still-water environments. Drone, an alcohol-based ambient accord, provided a continuous atmospheric layer across all three fields, sustaining the humid quality essential to the work. Rather than reconstructing wetlands literally, the installation made their sensory conditions and ecological memory perceptible through felt and embodied perception: the moisture, density, and more-than-human systems that once characterized these spaces.
Visitors encountered the work through movement and proximity, crossing a gradual transition between land and water registers. Scent operated as a spatial signal rather than an object, evoking saturation and submerged life. The installation made the persistence of lost ecologies present as atmosphere, duration, and spatial pressure, not as nostalgia, but as a shift in how we perceive and relate to the landscape.
Photos by
Isaiah Winters
Dimensions and Materials:
Variable dimensions
Soil-based composite forms, incense, ambient scent accords
This project is part of an ongoing body of work that uses scent as a spatial and temporal material to reveal suppressed ecological systems, layered histories, and conditions that persist beneath the visible surface of the city.