Drown (2023)

Drown takes its title from an unusual object carved by James Drown, a man about whom little is known who, in the early 19th century, spent around 5 months on the remote island Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. Drown, to mark time, carved a notch in a stick for each day he was there, along with the year, and the place-name “Providence, Rhode Island.” A sailor found the stick a few years after it was carved, and brought it back to Providence and presented it to Drown’s family, who hadn’t heard from him in years. A decade later, Drown appeared in Providence; there are no records detailing his reunion with his family. Drown is a piece about the marking of time, indicated by sharp, jagged notes always on D. The jagged notes appear as anchor-points through a series of variations: some quite peaceful, some angular and difficult, others frenzied and desperate. The piece ends in a state of oceanic suspension, a nod to the unknown and unknowable arc of this object’s journey across the globe. The so-called Calendar Stick is in the permanent collection of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and I would like to thank their curatorial staff, in particular Bethany Beatrice Gravel, for introducing me to this object.

- Nico Muhly