Sharp Song, Crop Over

I designed and fabricated Sharp Song, Crop Over as a site-specific installation for Sylvester Manor, a former slave provisioning plantation on New York’s Shelter Island quietly stewarded by a single family for over fifteen generations (1652-2014).

This landscape installation sonically awakened difficult, messy stories about New York’s wealth, its agricultural history and its primary relationship to slavery.

My ensemble of monumental cane knife instruments in Sharp Song, Crop Over had a two-fold conception: an homage to a simple, universal farm tool (the machete) as an extension of the hand and, through bespoke welding, a welcoming of new instrumentation and fieldsongs radiating from field tools rather than laboring bodies.  

In dissonance and harmony with these knives, reflective of the labyrinthine qualities of cane fields, the ensemble of Sharp Songs (machetes) were placed adjacent to a newly built labyrinth providing a physical pathway for contemplation.

Part of the installation title, Crop Over, references a centuries-old Barbadian laborers’ festival celebrating the end of the brutal sugarcane harvest. Crop Over is now a premiere Caribbean summer carnival. Crop Over also defines what happens at the point of a cane plant’s contact with the knife.