Photo by Isaiah Winters
Palimpsests III: Lentic Sequence, 2025
Prospect Park Boathouse, New York
Site-responsive spatial and olfactory installation
Soil-based composites, incense, and odorous molecules
Variable dimensions
Palimpsests is a series of site-responsive, multisensory installations exploring how environments hold layered histories and ecological memory through olfactory composition, site-derived matter, and spatial choreography.
Commissioned for Sí / Nix, the fifth Creative Science Dinner presented by NEW INC and The Oberon Group at the Prospect Park Boathouse on October 14, 2025, Palimpsests III: Lentic Sequence reflects on the loss and transformation of wetland ecologies. The dinner centered sound as a means of communicating complex ecological phenomena, with the installation presented alongside sound-based works within a shared multisensory environment.
Wetlands once extended across large areas of New York, including the landscape that became Prospect Park, before being drained, filled, or overwritten by development. The Boathouse overlooks the Lullwater, part of a constructed watercourse that retains older glacial and wetland conditions in altered form. The work placed the memory of lost wetlands in relation to this surviving, designed still-water environment.
The installation was conceived as the arrival sequence for the dinner. Positioned along the approach to the Boathouse, it allowed visitors to encounter the event through scent before the gathering came into view. Three sequential fields of porous, cast and sculpted soil-based composite forms were arranged along the entry path. The composite incorporated soil gathered from Prospect Park, materially grounding the work in the site’s present landscape.
The forms held the incense and received an ambient accord applied directly to their porous surfaces, functioning as interfaces for both modes of scent release. The three fields carried two original incense compositions I formulated. Movement I introduced a cooler, more open register associated with the transition between land and water. Movement II carried a denser, more saturated register associated with still-water environments. Drone, an alcohol-based ambient accord, extended continuously across all three fields and sustained an underlying impression of humidity. The change from Movement I to Movement II produced a gradual olfactory transition between land and still-water conditions, while Drone maintained continuity across the sequence.
In response to the dinner’s sound-centered premise, the work approached the wetland as a polyphonic ecological field shaped by the interdependence of air, water, vegetation, and organisms. Rather than reconstructing a wetland literally, Lentic Sequence carried this inaudible field into scent. The soil-based forms, two incense compositions, and continuous ambient accord made the wetland’s fertile density and interwoven rhythms perceptible through breath and memory.
Credits
Event: Creative Science Dinner 5: Sí / NixPresented by: NEW INC and The Oberon Group
Creative Science Track partner and funder: Simons Foundation
Venue: Prospect Park Boathouse, New York
Date: October 14, 2025
Photos by
Isaiah Winters
Video by Derek Schultz
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.