UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Emily Carris Duncan will give an artist talk and performance of “Trouble the Water” as part of the Penn State Department of Art History’s Harold E. Dickson Lecture Series at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 11, in 119 Ag Engineering Building at University Park.

The event is co-sponsored by the Center for Virtual/Material Studies with support from the Emilee J. Taylor Diversity Fund in Visual Arts in the College of Arts and Architecture.

“Trouble the Water” is a weaving and indigo dye study that explores what happens when sound waves and vocal frequencies are introduced to the dye bath during the dye process as a way of imprinting the sounds into the final woven product. For these studies, Carris Duncan sings the refrain “trouble the water” from the Black traditional song “Wade in the Water” into the indigo dye bath. The result is that at resonant frequencies, the sound waves agitate the water in the dye bath, causing the water to dance and create subtle shifts and variations in dye results. The resulting variegation comes to life when the threads are woven together to form subtle illustrations of the sound waves themselves.

Carris Duncan is an artist, educator and co-founder of High Pastures, previously The Art Dept. Collective, a non-profit interdisciplinary studio practice and retreat space dedicated to supporting the work of marginalized creative practitioners. Her work explores the materiality of trauma primarily using textile techniques like natural dyeing, quilting, knitting, yarn spinning and embroidery. Inspired by the work of artists like Alison Saar, Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson, Rosie Lee Tompkins and the Quilters of Gee’s Bend, Carris Duncan links the personal and cultural legacy of slavery while mulling the question of where trauma lives after the act. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including at the Cooper Union in New York, Islington Art Factory in London, The Colored Girls Museum, Past Present Projects, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, EFA Project Space in New York, Space Gallery in Portland, Maine, and Penn Museum in Philadelphia. She currently lives and works in Vermont, where she’s an incoming state representative.

The events at Penn State are part of a larger project called “Shuttle Service,” a community-based project led by Carris Duncan, Rachel Snack and Eugene Lew that spotlights and facilitates collective creation via weaving and sound/music-making by exploring common threads and encouraging the development of new connections between operators and visitors in these fields.