HAUNT: Particulars relating to some unaccountable noises in the House 

Artworks and Statement by Christine McDonald

Music in collaboration with Denver Nuckolls & Zachary McDonald

 

This body of work engages the wooden floor as both medium and mediator, situating the apartment not merely as private architecture but as a porous and sonorous site of relationality. The creaks and groans of floorboards function as an acoustic index—a material trace that evidences contact, stress, and habitation. These sounds destabilize domesticity’s presumed enclosure, reminding us that “home” is co-constructed through the permeability of infrastructures and the audibility of neighboring lives. In this sense, the floor articulates a shared, involuntary intimacy: our movements circulate across surfaces, resounding as both presence and interruption.

 

The rubbings translate this acoustic-spatial condition into a visual archive. By pressing graphite against the fibrous lines of the floor, the work captures a double displacement: the vertical forest reoriented into horizontal plank, and the horizontal surface reinscribed as cascading sheets along the gallery walls. This gesture reanimates the floor as a suspended forest, a spectral ecology wherein the labor of bearing weight is transformed into an aesthetic of line, repetition, and descent. Tim Ingold has argued that materials are not inert but “storied,” carrying histories of growth and use; the rubbings operate precisely in this register, treating the floor as both witness and collaborator.

 

From these rubbings, a musical score emerges, extending the project into the domain of performance and sound. Interpreted by The Boneyarders, the score exemplifies a transmedial translation: architecture becomes notation, notation becomes resonance. In this recursive loop, the domestic is abstracted, amplified, and redistributed into aesthetic experience. Here, the project also converses with acoustic ecology, where sound is understood not merely as byproduct but as ecological relation. The floorboards speak again—no longer as creak or groan, but as orchestrated vibration, staged as collaboration.

 

Ultimately, the project situates itself within contemporary dialogues; the rubbings recall post-minimalist strategies of index and repetition, while the sonic component extends into the terrain of sound studies and experimental music. In foregrounding the floor as both archive and instrument, the work resonates with practices of relational aesthetics: it is not only the object but also the intersubjective field—neighbors overhearing neighbors, musicians interpreting graphite traces—that becomes the site of meaning. In this way, the project underscores how infrastructures of dwelling are never silent supports but active participants, continuously translating weight, time, and proximity into aesthetic and social forms.