Artist-in-Residence at Moon Randolph Homestead | Summer 2025
Anne Yoncha in-residence at Moon-Randolph Homestead
How did you spend your time, construct your space, or engage with the community?
I felt very lucky to spend my days outside, surrounded by the bowl of the north hills, in a canvas tent studio, watching the wind move through human-height grass under the orchard.
Anne working in her tent studio at Moon-Randolph Homestead last August
Were there moments that surprised you or shifted your process?
My intention heading into the residency was to find ways to collaborate with the apple trees. At first, I’d only imagined visual art collaborations. Before leaving for the residency, a friend lent me a contact microphone to try in the orchard. This got me thinking about sonic collaborations. Could reconsidering the trees as composers help us think more critically about their agency?
Tell us more about what a sonic collaboration with a tree might look like.
I ended up spending quite a bit of time listening to the trees. I considered the limits of the capacity of the microphone to help us hear anything much smaller than human scale and the capacity of our technologies that help us make contact with our non-human neighbors. And maybe also, the limits of my own imagination and ideas around collaborating with organisms that can’t explicitly agree to be part of the collaborative effort. This is something I’d started thinking about while teaching our Bio-art course at MSU Denver this past spring – was our work with microbes a non-consensual collaboration, and how can anything be done differently with only the possibility of chemical communication? These are questions I am looking forward to exploring further in the next few years.
A few months before traveling to Missoula, I was part of a planning meeting for a sound art residency and heard some of the other artists discussing sound philosopher Pauline Oliveros. Over the course of my time at Moon-Randolph Homestead, I spent time reading and responding to many of Oliveros’ scores and learning about her practice of deep listening. I was especially interested in the idea of mentally reinforcing sounds and her thoughts about the power of imagined sound. Suppose the contact microphone couldn’t allow us to hear what was happening physiologically inside the tree, at a microbial level. Could I make work that prompts a viewer to imagine it and engage with these processes in that way?
Anne’ work inspired by the orchard’s pruning ‘wounds’ - sketch book pages + painting
Can you share how the residency connected to your ongoing practice or opened new avenues for exploration? At the orchard, I found myself thinking a lot about pruning as a form of care for the trees and also as an unhealable wound. Apparently, a tree can’t heal tissue in place – it can only do its best to compartmentalize the wound, and build new growth elsewhere! Meanwhile, we humans sometimes do our best to compartmentalize our own wounds but don’t have all that much success.
Katie shared a great book by pruning expert Alex Shigo, who though he was writing many decades ago, had a surprisingly contemporary approach, considering the tree as having a body and deserving dignity. He argues that we have removed orchard trees from natural growing conditions – an orchard is a post-human landscape – and so we have a responsibility to help them adapt to this new environment and new set of conditions and pressures. I spent some time mapping the pruning marks – traces of our relationship with these trees (see sketch book, above.) Now, I am spending this academic year thinking about how to create a Pauline Oliveros-style prompt for movement artists to interpret through performance. I haven’t worked much with movement-based artists before, so this is new territory for me.
In a broader sense, I am excited by some of the parallels I am starting to see between this composition work and my day job as an art professor. Creating a score for performers and generating a prompt for students seems similar, and I’m excited by the unpredictable new connections between my collaborations and my teaching.
Anne hammocking at Moon-Randolph and Albert Borgman’s book
What are you reading/watching/or listening to?
I’m re-reading Albert Borgmann’s “Crossing the Postmodern Divide”. Borgmann was one of my thesis advisors when I was a grad student at the University of Montana. Conversations with him about technology shaped how I think about data and sensing and how non-human beings, even inanimate matter, can be “eloquent” - one of the words he would frequently use. This summer, I had the chance to attend the Borgmann memorial lecture by Andrew Light, and I revisited some of these ideas after having lived in a few more parts of the world and acquiring more life experience. I also just finished a pretty wild body horror work, “Natural Beauty” by Ling Ling Huang for my book club, here in Denver.
How have your material choices changed over the years?
I love a new material process and encountering new challenges as I experiment. These days, sound is one of these new materials. It’s also funny to think of sound as matter – but it interacts with our bodies and spaces too. I got to attend a sound art residency last weekend in Pecos, NM with some other members of the Ecoartspace organization. There, I was able to experiment with new types of microphones, so now I’m full of thoughts about ways to listen to soil, water, and rocks. I am also considering ways to translate recordings into sonographs, drawings, and other visuals, which can then be reinterpreted as sound, and so on!he process, too.
Anne Yoncha kazooing her score, inspired by orchard trees at Moon-Randolph Homestead
What are you up to now (post Open AIR)? These days, I’m working on a multi-year project visualizing and sonifying soil health data under decomposing bison carcasses at Genesee Park, about 30 minutes west of Denver. My collaborator, Sarah Schliemann has been working on site for 2 years with the Denver Zoo and Denver Mountain Parks. She has been collecting soil samples in a grid moving outward from the carcass site and measuring changes in levels of chemical elements like sulfur, potassium, and magnesium. This should tell us how bison contribute to ecosystem health even after their death. To share this data and build affinity for the non-living matter underfoot, I buried cotton cloth at each soil-testing site for 2-6 months. Unearthing the cloth revealed a set of canvases marked by soil microbes.
My students at Metropolitan State University of Denver and I are painting in response to these microbial marks and Sarah’s dataset. I’m making stop-motion animations of these paintings so we can see the changes to the site over time. These animations will be paired with data sonifications and sound compositions by Denver-based experimental music group Playground Ensemble. My colleague in the music department, also a Playground Ensemble musician, David Farrell, is running a new Data Sonification class so students can engage in that part of the process, too.
Anne sharing her animation work inside of her Moon-Randolph Homestead studio (peek at similar works through Anne’s Vimeo account, just below.)
Visit These Links to Find Out More About Anne Yoncha
Anne’s 2025 Open AIR Artist Presentation Anne Yoncha’s Instagram Anne’s Website Anne’s Vimeo Collection Anne’s 2029 Open AIR Artist Interview
This interview has been edited slightly for clarity.
