Moon Bound
Outer Space
Moon
Sound
Performance
Outer Space
Moon
Sound
Performance
Moon Bound
I am one of 48 contributors to Moon Bound, an artists’ book created by the Moon Gallery Foundation that will launch to the Moon’s south pole in late 2025 and land there in 2026.
My contribution, When I Was You, is an original song — a duet between Earth and Moon, and between mother and child. The piece begins from contemporary science, which tells us the Moon was once part of the Earth, cast off and made separate. It transforms this cosmological history into song, imagining the intimacy of a dialogue between two bodies that were once one. At the same time, it carries the tenderness of a mother–child duet, an echo of love and separation, connection and transmission.
This work grows directly out of my wider practice of singing with archives: engaging with glass-plate astronomy photographs at Harvard Plate Stacks (@harvardplatestacks) and Carnegie Observatories (@carnegiescience); researching the phonautograph, the first known recording of a human voice traced in soot; and creating performances on voice, recording, and belonging. In 2024, at Glasgow School of Art (@glasgowschoolart) for the Queer Materialities conference, I performed a live electronic duet that wove together interviews with my mother about her own history of singing — an exploration of the ways voice, memory, and recording act as fragile but powerful forms of inheritance.
When I Was You brings this thread full circle. This autumn I will record the track with my mother as the artist Bliss Carmxn (@blisscarmxn), working with my longtime collaborator and producer ROOKES (@iamrookes). The recording will be released publicly alongside the lunar landing in 2026.
One tiny book. Forty-eight voices. A journey beyond Earth.
Photos by Art and Such Evan (@artandsuchevan).
I am one of 48 contributors to Moon Bound, an artists’ book created by the Moon Gallery Foundation that will launch to the Moon’s south pole in late 2025 and land there in 2026.
My contribution, When I Was You, is an original song — a duet between Earth and Moon, and between mother and child. The piece begins from contemporary science, which tells us the Moon was once part of the Earth, cast off and made separate. It transforms this cosmological history into song, imagining the intimacy of a dialogue between two bodies that were once one. At the same time, it carries the tenderness of a mother–child duet, an echo of love and separation, connection and transmission.
This work grows directly out of my wider practice of singing with archives: engaging with glass-plate astronomy photographs at Harvard Plate Stacks (@harvardplatestacks) and Carnegie Observatories (@carnegiescience); researching the phonautograph, the first known recording of a human voice traced in soot; and creating performances on voice, recording, and belonging. In 2024, at Glasgow School of Art (@glasgowschoolart) for the Queer Materialities conference, I performed a live electronic duet that wove together interviews with my mother about her own history of singing — an exploration of the ways voice, memory, and recording act as fragile but powerful forms of inheritance.
When I Was You brings this thread full circle. This autumn I will record the track with my mother as the artist Bliss Carmxn (@blisscarmxn), working with my longtime collaborator and producer ROOKES (@iamrookes). The recording will be released publicly alongside the lunar landing in 2026.
One tiny book. Forty-eight voices. A journey beyond Earth.
Photos by Art and Such Evan (@artandsuchevan).
Moon Bound book and process
Photos by Art and Such Evan (@artandsuchevan)