I am a Kanien'kehá:ka–Acadian–Irish–Scottish water protector, sound artist and percussionist living and working within the unceded and unsurrendered homelands of the Wolastoqiyik, Mi’kmaq and Peskotomuhkati peoples in Wabanaki territory. I am applying to the Canada Council for the Arts to support the creation of a sound art project that engages tidal rhythms as a decolonial framework for percussion. Through a relational, place-responsive process along the Bay of Fundy—home to the world's highest and lowest tides—I will co-compose with water through a drumming practice grounded in resonant receptivity, centring the water drum as both an ancestral technology and the literal surface of the sea to embrace an emergent (and submergent) ethics of improvisation attuned to cyclical, fluid temporalities.

Anchored in my sustained engagement with the material and auditory relationships between the drum and the environment, this project extends my practice into temporal decolonization, positioning percussion as a site of inquiry into time. By engaging drumming as a means of listening with the more-than-human world, I seek to unsettle colonial models of linear, extractive time in order to sonically activate the embodied animacy of water—engaging an acoustic reciprocity where rhythm emerges as an active return to relational time as pathways to reclaiming creative sovereignty.

Building upon a creative research period where I developed rhythmic tools and place-attuned temporal frameworks, this project applies these approaches to create new work through fieldwork, studio practice, a residency, and mentorship—yielding a multichannel audio composition integrating water soundscapes and tidal drumming; a documented, site-responsive percussion performance on the Bay of Fundy; and a series of scores inspired by tidal cycles. The final work will be presented locally through Where the Wetlands Are, a new group exhibition focused on Wabanaki wetlands, and internationally through CoastARTS, an artistic initiative exploring littoral environments as sites where environmental crises, (post)colonial practices, and more-than-human ecologies intersect.

Water is the connective tissue of our planet and, like rhythm, requires cooperation and reciprocity. Bridging ancestral technology and sonic worldmaking, this project will articulate the shoreline as a living aural threshold, where tidal vibrations, oceanic pulses and embodied listening cultivate a re-membering between water, body and sound—creating sonic continuities between articulations of the past, present and future of our acoustic commons: the ocean.