A Meditation in Blue at the Arb

Sound artist Rebecca Goldberg collected the sights and sounds of Nichols Arboretum over the course of a year to create her latest work, The Arb. Photography by Tatum Poirier

Listening to birdsong on a walk last year sparked an idea for Rebecca Goldberg (A.B. ’07).

“I thought it would be interesting to capture the audio,” she says. “This would be a way of capturing nature patterns, and the individual kinds of birds that are here.”

The idea grew into The Arb, a project in which Goldberg marked the passage of time by visiting the Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor once every season to record the sounds and sights of the forest, trails, and the Huron River. She was led by a guiding question each time she entered the woods: How do I reflect the essence of this region of Michigan, and of the physical experience of this moment in time?

Goldberg describes her audio recordings of the forest—which also feature local insects, the breaking of sheets of ice, the dripping of snowmelt, and other sounds—as “kind of like a science project”—one in which an active sense of wonder is sufficient impetus for engaging with the natural world.

Goldberg says that her sense of awe and attentive engagement with the natural world is rooted in her humanities studies in LSA. Photography by Tatum Poirier

After coming up with the sound element of the yearlong installation, Goldberg—for whom the roles of producer, performer, DJ, and designer comprise an eclectic career—was inspired to represent the seasons of the Arb visually as well, and she began creating nature prints concurrently with the audio recordings.

As with the audio component, Goldberg’s artistic process for the prints was straightforward, anchored in a perspective of wonder and focused attention. Goldberg made cyanotypes, which are created by a simple method of printing that uses sensitized blue paper. Objects are arranged on the paper, and after development in natural light and water, the impressions of those objects create a printed image.

In its most fundamental form, cyanotype printing is accessible—the paper is sold widely and affordably as “Sunprints”—recalling the instinctive creativity of childhood. But the process is also versatile, and, combined with other techniques, can render more complex and sophisticated prints as well.

Goldberg’s cyanotypes for The Arb showcase objects found in the woods—oak leaves, halved acorns, and river stones—and to set her prints, she used the reticent Michigan sun and Huron River water.

Goldberg gathered light, sound, water, and texture in the Arb, during fall, winter, spring, and summer. Fall, winter, and spring photography by Rebecca Goldberg. Summer photography by Tatum Poirier

The foliage of fall made for an expressive cyanotype, but she also had to brave powerful wind gusts. In the winter, she went sliding down a hill in a blizzard. In the spring, chatty trailwalkers brought their conversation right into the recording. During her summer recording, she worked in the morning humidity to beat the heat as this year’s cicada brood sang.

Winter, not surprisingly, was the most challenging of all the seasons. After confirming she had not sustained any injuries while sliding down the icy hill, Goldberg was concerned about how her winter print would turn out. Cyanotypes require sunlight—the more sunlight the better—and Michigan was characteristically gray-skied on that day in the woods. The winter print, however, was an unexpected success.

“It came out really abstract, soaking wet with snowflakes,” she says.

Goldberg’s sound was also dominated by the elements on the day of her winter recording. She considers that recording the most authentic one, having chosen to record during a snowstorm.

“It turned out to be a perfect representation of the season,” Goldberg says.

Goldberg shares aspects of her artistic process and inspiration for The Arb. Video by Tatum Poirier, featuring original sound recordings by Rebecca Goldberg

The Arb installation signals a kind of full-circle moment for Goldberg as an artist, a return to the place that “taught me how to learn.

“I wanted to focus on a place within the place that is my foundation,” she says. Goldberg looks back on her time in LSA as “a launchpad.” She says that her sense of awe and attentive engagement with the natural world is rooted in her humanities studies in the college.

Goldberg entered LSA as a transfer student after studying marketing at her previous institution. “At U-M,” she says, “I wanted to see what else I could do.”

As an incoming student, Goldberg’s passions ranged from music to art to psychology. She wanted to immerse herself in an education that was as interdisciplinary as her interests and was advised to pursue a major in the Department of American Culture. Good advice for a student eager to follow many branches of knowledge in a creative way.

“American culture is what led me to travel the world with art and music, to develop that empathy and curiosity about people, art, and culture.” In the department, Goldberg took classes on the history of American popular music, Hawaiian literature, and Native and feminist studies. These courses ignited her innate curiosity.

“I wanted more after that,” she says.

Inspired by what she had learned, Goldberg began making her own art and music. Since then, she’s developed a career as a DJ, created a soundscape of Michigan for the BBC, and through the World Listening Project, started a soundwalk group in which she guided people on long walks through Detroit, to record the sounds of the Q line, Woodward Avenue, Belle Isle, and the Fisher Body Plant.

“Everyone asks if I’m a teacher after learning my undergrad major, but I’m not,” she says. “I consider myself a lifelong student.”

The Huron River was Goldberg’s co-collaborator in the creation of her cyanotype prints. Photography by Tatum Poirier

The Arb evokes a complex relationship between the human and nonhuman worlds and invites audiences to reconsider their perspective and scale in terms of the vastness and variety of the natural world.

“We humans have been toxic to the environment in many ways,” Goldberg says. “We are part of a bigger picture, and we are not the only ones here.” 

Goldberg returns often to the idea of her artistic process as being akin to meditation. And she says this kind of engagement with nature, one that inspires artmaking, is for everyone.

“Everyone has a phone in their pocket these days,” Goldberg says. “But this is a different way to approach what’s there.”

Goldberg aims to inspire her audience to meditate on their surroundings. “By focusing on our different senses we can experience the world in an unconventional way. And we can do this anywhere,” she says.

Maybe, inside of this reframed focus on the natural world, there’s hope for repair between humans and the environment. But at the very least, Goldberg’s The Arb demonstrates that everything around us—reflections on the Huron River, tulips surfacing through a bed of snow, strangers’ conversations mixed with birdsong—holds potential for artistic collaboration.

“Maybe this [project] jumpstarts someone else exploring their world this way,” Goldberg says.

Our first task in this exploration, she says, is to be present, to look and to listen to our surroundings.

Making a cyanotype print at home is an approachable way to collaborate on an art project with the natural world. The simplest method uses pretreated solar print paper, which can be found in most art supply stores, or online, for less than $10.

1. Inside your home—or in the shade—assemble a work station. A tray will be helpful for ferrying your cyanotype paper and your objects in and out of the sun. The solar print paper can stay inside its envelope for now.
2. Collect some objects that will fit on the surface of your pretreated solar print paper. Admire their silhouettes and consider how their shapes might translate to a two-dimensional print. These objects can be ordinary: an elegant Lego, a paperclip, a diminutive Block M, perhaps? Or you can go outside to collect objects like leaves, feathers, rocks, flowers—anything you think might show up beautifully against the bright blue of the paper.
3. Ok, now return to your tray, remove your solar print paper from its envelope, and lay it flat on the tray. Arrange the objects on your paper. 
4. Now, bring your tray into natural light. Expose the paper, now laden with objects, to direct sun for up to fifteen minutes, until the blue of the paper lightens to nearly white. 
5. Submerge the paper under flowing water. (The Huron River works for this, but so does the water from your kitchen faucet or garden hose.) After a minute it should run clear. 
6. Let the paper dry flat. If you dislike the curled edge of your paper after it has dried, you may press your print in a book to smooth it out.
7. Admire what you have created.

How does it work? 

Ultraviolet light reacts with iron chemicals in the treated paper, making the iron in the parts of the paper that are exposed to natural light soluble—that is, it can be dissolved by water—and turning the paper a bright blue color when it is rinsed. The covered parts of the paper have been shielded from UV light, so the iron molecules in the paper are insoluble and remain white after being rinsed with water.