Coco Allred | Primacy of Shape
September 16–29
Extensions of Soil
November 7 – 14, 2025
Gallery Hours: 12:00 – 5:00
* Closed Mondays
Special Events:
Nov 7: 5:00 – 7:00 Opening Reception and Musical Performance
Nov 11: 12:00 – 2:00 Children Drop-In Making Session
Extensions of Soil is an installation by artist Coco Allred (SMACT ’26) and composer Ophelia Ariadne Worbes (Berklee College of Music). Within the soil, mycelium, comprised of fine strings, creates vast underground networks that share information and nutrients across forests. Informed by the process of fungal networks, Allred and Worbes turn to strings within their disciplines — paper weavers and string instruments — as the material starting point for creative exchange.
The gallery is enveloped in a woven meshwork of Tyvek, a spun fibrous material most commonly used as a protective skin for buildings in process, that evolves over the course of the installation through participatory weaving. Sculptures for Soil Drawings animate the surfaces of the installation with shadow projections of live drawing. Trio for Strings acts as the spore, first heard in its premiere performance on Nov 7, and becomes a source for iteration through improvisation in response to live weaving and soil drawing in the gallery. Presented as a score for the space in collaboration with sound designer Chuowen Liang, Trio for Strings becomes a fractal composition entangled with the additional sites of production, integrating recordings of the forest and the studio. We invite your participation as active shapers of this evolving network.
The title, Extensions of Soil, or EOS, comes from Francis D. Hole (1913 – 2002), a geography and soil science professor at UW-Madison. He understood love as a necessary condition for social change and transformation and created songs, experiences, and terminology to encourage shifting relationality to soil, appreciating it as a vital substrate from which life emerges. Rather than signing PhD after his name, he signed TNS, or temporarily not soil, and encourages us to think of ourselves and all living things as extensions of soil.
Coco Allred, Concept and Installation
Ophelia Ariadne Worbes, Musical Composition
Gallery Opening and Premiere of Trio for Strings
Nov 7, 2025 from 5:00 – 7:00 PM
- Ophelia Ariadne Worbes, Composer
- Chuowen Liang, Sound Design
- Alicia Wu, Violin
- Rain Z, Viola
- Nathan Frederiksen, Hammered Dulcimer
