Last updated: October 12, 2024
Place
Spring Lot Bridge
Ellen Smith Ahern
This location is a stop along the self-guided Ecotone Trail, which can be found on the NPS app.
The Ecotone Trail is a self-guided tour featuring three original sound compositions and an array of embodied listening practices for public use. Created by local artists, Ellen Smith Ahern and Menghan Wang, the trail traces the intersections of multiple transitional habitats or ecotones, where one habitat and its distinctive soundscape shifts into another. The artists are drawn to ecotones as liminal spaces of ongoing transformation where our human senses and imaginations can be more active, noticing shifts in the space around us and the way we occupy it. Weaving field recordings of environmental and multi-species sounds where forest habitat meets brook, meadow and road, the Ecotone Trail invites visitors to listen closely and consider their own relationship to “ecologies in tension”.
Ellen Smith Ahern is a dance artist and social worker/community organizer living with her family on Abenaki lands in N’Dakinna/New Hampshire. Her work explores the intersection of movement, storytelling and nature, including a wider array of people than might otherwise feel welcomed into traditional dance spaces. Ellen has performed and taught around the world and is honored to be a 2024 Artist in Residence at Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park.
Menghan Wang is an interdisciplinary sound artist and independent curator living in Vermont. Her work reflects the interplays between undercurrent and representation, self and otherness, creating environments that invoke inner journeys to (re)explore, reflect, and (re)discover the interrelations between the self and the environment. She received a Master of Arts degree in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) in Germany, and her work has been presented at Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum Project, Goethe-Institut Beijing, Climate Care Festival Berlin, etc.