Station to Station is an installation and durational performance collaboration between visual artist Laurel Sparks and sound artist Shawn Hansen. The installation consists of a painted floor cloth mirroring six overlapping string figures that span the ceiling of Soloway Gallery. An outdated television set plays an evolving video and sound loop. Each Sunday over the course of six weeks, Sparks maps a new string figure atop the previous one, gradually building and layering monochromatic fabric chains accompanied by Hansen’s sound compositions created with analog synthesizers and saxophone. Both Hansen’s sound and video compositions and Sparks’s performances are derived from the mathematical poetic structure of the sestina, a system the two artists developed collaboratively over a period of three years.

Sparks and Hansen share an interest in string figures as well as esoteric divination systems. The sestina is governed by the number six, and Hansen and Sparks chose the six-sided hexagram as the geometric structure for their string figure. The hexagram is formed by lines originating from six points, the “stations” referenced in the title. The string figure’s linear pathways, as well as the floor cloth’s solid forms, are determined by the numerical sequencing of the sestina. Through the sestina format, Hansen and Sparks reimagine the string figure—a preliterate storytelling device—as a contemporary tool for divination. Rather than assigning the string figure a message to convey, Sparks and Hansen observe and listen to what the string figure itself reveals.

Each Sunday, Sparks recites a sestina while installing a new string figure onto the gallery ceiling as a recording or live performance of Hansen’s corresponding score unfolds. By the conclusion of the exhibition, six constellations of colored bricolage chains span the ceiling, rhyming with the painted floor cloth below and transforming the space into a large geometric matrix suspended within a sonic field.