Fields and Trails

Fields and Trails is a participatory sensory installation exploring smell, instinct, memory, and non-visual forms of orientation. Inspired by the mythic and astronomical associations of the dog stars Sirius and Procyon: celestial bodies historically linked with navigation, survival, seasonal change, and animal intelligence, this work invites participants to perceive and follow invisible trails.

Upon entering the space, visitors receive a brief initiation and are invited to soften or partially obscure their vision. Moving through suspended lengths of scented gauze, participants navigate by smell rather than sight, following subtle atmospheric traces dispersed throughout the installation.

Dogs navigate the world through scent in ways humans have largely forgotten. This installation asks what forms of perception emerge when vision recedes and other instincts become primary. What do we follow without fully understanding why? What memories surface through smell? What invisible signals guide us individually and collectively?

After moving through the installation, participants are invited to reflect upon the experience and write a message drawn from memory, sensation, intuition, or desire. These anonymous reflections are deposited into a communal archive where they may later be retrieved by future visitors, creating an evolving divinatory exchange between strangers across time.

The work proposes scent as a form of orientation: ancestral, bodily, relational, and ecological. Rather than offering fixed meaning or prescribed celestial divination, the installation creates conditions for participants to encounter their own instincts and the unseen patterns through which humans continue to seek guidance, connection, and direction.