Tessie Word
Earlid | spring 2015

Things may fall apart, may not come together. But in artistic practice, there’s a chance it will. Painful places are silent places, but artistry opposes this silence.

With nostalgia and sadness driving much of her work, Tessie Word stands before a community that could suddenly be wiped out. Ironically she found herself trapped on the Oregon coast in a storm while talking to people about what it would be like if a tsunami hit the disaster-prone U.S. west coast. Her eventual radioesque work is grounded in stormy aurality: oscillating, rogue waves, surf froth and radio blips and transmissions tumble into a composite of sound.

Tessie Word suggests that using her voice—in song only rather than explaining via narration—parallels this vulnerability of geography and her own emotional sense of self.