MARIANNA HOITT-LANGE 

“Hear”

This piece was recorded on unceded Matinecock land, in the Welwyn Nature Preserve (Glen Cove, NY) on a summer evening when the mosquitos were frolicking. Using a Tascam recorder with some reverb and overdubbing, the artist shared sounds with the stream, the flies, and a delicious bass-line plane flying overhead.

… with Gretchen Saveson

“Little people with wings”

To begin creating this art piece in response to “Hear,” I listened to the music with closed eyes and waited to see where it would bring me. I moved instantly into the forest, where my mind is usually oriented, where the layers of sounds from strings sounded to me like little voices suspended on wingbeats. 

The musician’s voice guided my thoughts to the image of a mosquito, and I was reminded of one time when a mosquito bit me after a long day of hiking. I couldn’t bring myself to swish it off me, thinking about how consequential a meal is to a mosquito and how inconsequential a bug bite is to my relatively large body. The asymmetry of that interaction led me to play with scale in this illustration, where bug and human bodies take up similar space on the page.

As I listened, many individual fragments of sound moved in fast and reckless ways through my mind, yet their paths intersected and wove together such that I was given a comforting sense of connection. I wanted to hold that sense of connection and movement— dancing links between human and non-human people, sound and light, musician and illustrator— and so drew both creatures facing one another with pen marks literally linking them.