Once She Dries

Once She Dries is a multimedia installation that blends sculpture, video projections, and sound to tell a story of coral reefs and climate change. 

The piece unfolds as a looped recording, featuring an original score (vocals, piano, violin) and video projections that cycle every half hour. The work’s narrative stems from a scientific love story: when corals begin overheating, they release a pheromone-like bio-chemical that triggers cooling cloud formations. In a way that feels nearly romantic, corals are able to attract a cloud. Once She Dries tracks the perilous journey of Coral as she navigates an unstable climate that endangers her ability to communicate with clouds and threatens to bleach and dry her entire reef. 

Upon entering the installation, visitors are surrounded by a panoramic paper loop of blues, greens and grays that conjures shifting weather and sea conditions. Sculptural seating immerses the audience, as attendees sit within three-dimensional cushioned forms that evoke coral and oceanic landscape. The narrator of this piece is seen rather than heard, as four video projections embedded in sculptural formations shift narrative text and abstract visual sequences across the walls.

Once She Dried opened March 2023 in Jersey City, where Nancy Cohen and Meagan Woods currently live, as a way of connecting a local community with international artists who are all reflecting upon the global crisis of coral reef devastation. Experimentality is central to these artists’ interdisciplinary and far-reaching collaboration. Once She Dries exists between and across traditional genres, in a gesture of bringing together diverse artists and members of the community to find their own way of connecting to this project’s engaging combination of research, narrative, and form.

During the month long exhibition of Once She Dries in Jersey City, we hosted a series of community-based events including a youth art workshop, an art + science talk focused on our project and Global Coralition’s reef restoration activism, a film night where we screened and discussed the documentary Coral Woman, a community potluck dinner, and on-site conversations with college classes. In addition to these events, we hosted hundreds of visitors, many of whom made repeat visits and became themselves further invested in the future of our coral reefs. The project was featured in Anthroposphere: The Oxford University Climate Review, and written about by Susan Hoffman Fishman in the online journal Art Spiel as the first article in their new series Hot Air, which is devoted to art about climate change.

In fall 2023, Once She Dries traveled to Taiwan for the International Biennial for Paper and Fibre Art. We continue to develop this project and look forward to sharing the installation in future exhibitions. 

Collaborating Artists: Nancy Cohen (installation/project coordinator), Meagan Woods (story/project coordinator), Xinyue Liu (video projections), Casper Leerink (piano/sound engineering), Kourosh Ghamsari-Esfahani (violin/sound editing), and Amanda Sum (vocal)