Semantron; paper, concrete; 2026
The Semantron is a liturgical instrument in certain eastern Catholic and Orthodox Monasteries, it is essentially a plank of wood that is banged upon by wooden mallet. Very cool.
But the Semantron is more of a symbol guiding my thoughts about calls to prayer, about the sacralization of mundane sounds, about the disintegration of wood from this daily use— many of these Semantrons show the generations of wear from being hit by mallets. I am thinking about pain and its proximity to pleasure, about the waves crashing against the pier of Pohoiki and the reverberating sounds of memory.
The concrete is salvaged from the dredging project at Pohoiki, mangled concrete forms I pulled from the pile of sand up on the hillside. The pages are loose leafs of my Great Grandmother's bible, eaten through by pests. The page forms resemble the fountaining eruptions of Kilauea I think, or maybe they are just the fragmented manuscripts of a sacred text, eaten by pests, ringing with the sounds of moth-eaten-prayer.
