You Are Marvelous (2018) is a performance work incorporating video, text, sound, and object that merges a lineage of proto-humans with those of a biologically immortal lake creature, the oldest trees in the world, and a visitor to a modern-day psychic. The piece has been performed solo and collaboratively, with the text recited live.

“For eons after the fall, Lucy’s body lay in the dirt, and as it decayed it was consumed by sediment, which penetrated the bones with mineralized groundwater. This produced gradual and inconspicuous effects, dependent not on any single act of violation but on the ceaselessness of the mineral force, and at each giving-way the bones were further penetrated, until millions of years later, they sat fossilized within a sandy bluff in Ethiopia.”

“Perhaps there too had been a hydra there beside Lucy those eons ago, glowing in its translucence in the rippled light of a brook, floating from shallow to shallow through the centuries, following the glaciers as they parted the land. Perhaps it is that very hydra that we look upon now, placed delicately upon a slide stage with the precision of a fine set of evolutionarily ordained fingers and thumbs.

An obituary:
Hydra, dead at 3,219,876 years, because it made a nice picture.”

“Somewhere in our timeline, perhaps fueled by the biomatter of Lucy’s decay, a bristlecone pine sprouted from a seed. Over the next 5,000 years, it too enacted the principle of ceaselessness, advancing in height and breadth minutely, unspectacularly, but now offering us a glimpse into prehistory as the oldest living thing on earth.

What is it like to be a bristlecone pine?”