ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice has always begun with acute observation. For twenty-five years I have worked across installation, painting, textiles, sound and video, from the ecofeminist understanding that land, animals and bodies are all shaped by the same extractive logic. I grew up swimming in a creek bordered by two Superfund sites, and my body is now part of the ecological record due to heavy metal exposure.
My ongoing series, Field Notes: A Requiem, begins with the practice of seeing everything and distilling it into parts that are beautiful and fleeting: moments that vanish as soon as they happen and can’t be brought back. Through my work, firefly flashes, 1,200 years of saltmarsh sediment, and a full night of stars crossed by satellites each become a composition, an image, a feeling. Like a trail camera tripped in the dark, each work snares the last moment it could be caught, and stands in defiance of shifting baseline syndrome*.
My work is now moving into the field, following routes that people and animals have navigated since the Ice Age. Our ancestors lived through change measured in millennia; we are living through it in a matter of years. I want to listen to what ancient places still hold, and to ask whether we can bear change happening this fast.
*Shifting baseline syndrome (SBS) is a psychological and ecological phenomenon where each new generation accepts a more degraded or depleted state of the natural environment as “normal”.
BRIEF STATEMENT
An interdisciplinary artist working from an ecofeminist framework, I translate ecological data into sound and time-based media through custom software. My series Field Notes: A Requiem records disappearing natural systems, from fireflies and saltmarsh sediment to the night sky, as baselines for a world changing faster than we can remember it. The work now follows the ancient routes of people and animals, listening to what we are losing.
BIO
I grew up in New York state, swimming daily in a creek that I later discovered borders two Superfund sites. Heavy metals had been flowing into that waterway for years, and I believe they led to the multiple autoimmune diseases I live with today.
For much of my career, my pursuit of art and my practice took place in materials. After two years at Hartford Art School, I spent most of my time painting custom murals and small paintings. In the late ’90s I became a graphic designer and worked in that field in Manhattan until 9/11. By February 2002 I had moved not only out of the city but out of state. I came to Cape Cod because a gallery here was already showing my small paintings, and I never left. I’m an active member of Provincetown’s gallery and museum culture, and of land and animal conservation and a wide range of the earth sciences, through friendships with and proximity to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown.
In 2018 I began creating large-scale installations from salvaged commercial fishing gear, with resources from the Marine Debris and Plastics Program at the Center for Coastal Studies. In Man, Materials, and Our Lasting Legacy in the Sea (2022), I built a life-size North Atlantic right whale ribcage from the material most notorious for its entanglement deaths: 6,000 feet of lobster rope. Heritage Museums & Gardens in Sandwich, Massachusetts, commissioned the piece, and it stayed on the grounds for the summer season. The following year I made The Birth of Commodity (2023), an allegory for resource exploitation, a theme I have witnessed firsthand since swimming in that toxic water.
My work has been shown widely, in group and solo gallery exhibitions in Santa Monica (2004), New York (2005 to present), Atlanta (2008), Boston (2018 to present) and Provincetown and Cape Cod every year since 2002. In 2019, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum acquired a work of mine for its permanent collection.
Residencies are where the work gets done. Twenty Summers taught me that I can install a barn-sized work complete with fresh-cut vegetation, document it with light and sound, give a talk and de-install it, all within 48 hours. The Peaked Hill Trust’s Arts and Sciences dune shack residency became a meditation on darkness and artificial light, with an enormous handmade moth. The Boston Harbor Islands marine debris field residency turned the white sacks that volunteers filled, each with hundreds of pounds of debris, into a portrait documentary project. In August 2026 I sailed with the Rozalia Project aboard the research vessel American Promise, recording the Gulf of Maine with a hydrophone.
I began collaborating with scientists during some of these residencies, and it fundamentally changed the direction of my work. I spent my time with ecologists, geologists and marine biologists learning about their fieldwork. I came to understand that scientific data is itself a form of elegy. The numbers, core samples, population counts and contamination levels are all a record of what has existed and what is disappearing. I wanted to make that record audible, to move the data out of the spreadsheet and into the body of the listener. Presenting information through a different sense creates a deeper understanding of the subject, and to me, understanding leads to empathy.
In late 2025 I began developing Field Notes: A Requiem, an ongoing series that translates scientific and environmental data into immersive sound and time-based media. Each work looks at a natural system in decline and renders it audible, creating a record of what is still here. Three works are now finished. Lit from Within follows the flash patterns of four firefly species in a Harwich meadow; it premiered at Farm Projects in Wellfleet in August 2026 and was projected on the mainsail of the schooner Hindu in Provincetown Harbor. Deposits: Duck Harbor Core III sounds 1,200 years of saltmarsh sediment from Wellfleet, with support from the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod. discord|concord records a full night of stars over Maine, crossed by satellites.
The shift toward time-based work also reflects the realities of my own body as my autoimmune disease progresses. Sonification lets me keep making challenging, research-driven work that is less physically demanding.
Curator C. Sean Horton wrote a preview of Lit from Within, the first finished Field Notes piece, for the Provincetown Independent, noting that “a requiem is traditionally composed after a loss; Stone’s project begins earlier, documenting living systems while they still endure.” Field Notes: A Requiem is not an elegy for what is already gone. It’s a record, made for the future, of what is still here today. Horton also observed that the work “shifts her role from maker to listener; rather than inventing a visual language, she uncovers one already present in the landscape, building a framework that allows fireflies to become collaborators rather than subjects.”
Using custom code I’ve written for MATLAB, a programming and computing platform, I translate data into MIDI files, digital files that carry instructions for music but no sound of their own. I then give each MIDI track a voice in a digital audio workstation, using recorded acoustic instruments from the G-Town Church Sampling Project by Tobias Marberger. The result is experimental sound work born from our planet’s own information.
Attention paid to the earth, and collaboration with scientists, is amplified here. The sewn surfaces and painted animals of my earlier practice are giving way to custom sound and projected light. (I couldn’t resist hand-sewing a recycled linen flag to “fly” for my first screening, a practice I plan to continue.) The work is now moving into the field, following routes that people and animals have navigated since the Ice Age, from the passage tombs of Brittany to those of North Wales, where my great-grandmother’s family worked the slate. My practice continues to ask, “How do I bear witness to what is disappearing, and manage my own grief over it all?” I will keep recording it, and hope that others will feel it in their bodies.
MINI BIO
Gin Stone is an interdisciplinary artist based on Cape Cod whose work moves between installation, painting, textiles, sound and video. Raised beside a creek bordered by two Superfund sites, she works from an ecofeminist view of land, animals and bodies shaped by the same extractive logic. Her large-scale installations from salvaged fishing gear include a life-size North Atlantic right whale ribcage built from 6,000 feet of lobster rope, commissioned by Heritage Museums & Gardens. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Her ongoing series, Field Notes: A Requiem, translates scientific data into sound and time-based media through custom software she writes: firefly flashes, 1,200 years of saltmarsh sediment, and a night of stars crossed by satellites. Lit from Within premiered at Farm Projects in Wellfleet in 2026, and Deposits was supported by the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod.