Locust Projects presents Drawn Breath, Exhaled Frequencies, a transatlantic conversation of whispered resistance and ecological anxiety, framed through a reimagined sonic architecture in the Project Room. Conceived by artist Michael Webster in collaboration with writers Arsimmer McCoy and Selina Nwulu, the exhibition adopts the early 20th-century technology of sound mirrors, once engineered to detect the threat of incoming war planes, as vessels for spoken voice.

The installation stages a listening encounter between continents, between silence and resonance, and between breath and the urgency of speech. Originally constructed along the English coastline as part of an acoustic early warning system to register aircraft crossing the Channel, the now-obsolete sound mirror is reversed in this context to transmit, rather than receive, the voices of writers in dialogue. These parabolic structures are designed to concentrate faint acoustic signals to a single, audible, focal point. Pairs of mirrors, fabricated by Webster, are positioned throughout the space to create discrete listening zones, where signal is condensed, and speech becomes legible. In this redeployed architectural space, listening is no longer passive; it becomes an intentional act of spatial positioning.

The voices of McCoy and Nwulu are projected as fragmented, overlapping transmissions. Their words carry the weight of coded warnings and quiet solidarity, marked by tenderness, a reaching across distance. What emerges is a layered field of frequencies moving through the installation like tides, returning in loops and fragments. Sound and language wash over the space in varying intensities. In this environment, listening is strained and complicated - it is a generous and deeply embodied act.

About the Artists

Michael Webster responds to the social organization of space through site-specific projects, sculpture, and lens-based media. His work is context-driven and materially attuned, investigating the effects of power on social geography with a focus on long-term participatory projects rooted in the southern United States. He has attended residencies at McColl Center, ChaNorth, Hambidge Center, Elsewhere Living Museum, and Penland School of Craft. He was the runner-up for the 2023 South Arts Southern Prize and was selected as the South Carolina State Fellow.

Webster has had solo exhibitions at Coker University, the LIVLAB Space at Western Carolina University, and Columbia College, SC. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from East Carolina University and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, he is a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid and an Associate Professor at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Arsimmer McCoy, a celebrated poet, creative programmer, and cultural strategist, continues to elevate South Florida’s creative and civic landscape through award-winning storytelling, community-centered archiving, and dynamic public programming.

Born and raised in Carol City, McCoy is known for blending poetic narrative with civic memory to honor Black life and place in Miami. She is the founder of Ms. Mary’s House | The Carol City Museum, a grassroots archival initiative housed in her family home. Her work centers cultural preservation, environmental stewardship, and intergenerational care as critical acts of community justice.

In 2024 and 2025, McCoy has been widely recognized for her contributions to arts and culture. She received the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Poetry Award and was a recipient of the 2025 Arts & Environment Award through the Miami-Dade Department of Cultural Affairs. She’s a past grantee of The Miami Foundation, Locust Projects' WaveMaker program, and a featured artist with Oolite Arts and AIRIE (Artist in Residence in the Everglades).

McCoy’s recent collaborations include film-poetry projects screened at the BlackStar Film Festival, Slamdance, and SoundScape Park, as well as live performances with TEDxMDC, IlluminArts, the Adrienne Arsht Center, and Vizcaya Museum. Institutions across Miami have commissioned her poetic voice, and she currently collaborates with EXILE Books and MAVEN Leadership Collective on the 2024 zine project A Spell to Grow a Garden.

Through her work, McCoy shapes cross-sector ecosystems of care, culture, and creative resistance, pushing Miami’s cultural canon toward inclusive and rooted futures.

Selina Nwulu is an award-winning poet and essayist of Nigerian heritage. Her work has been widely featured in a variety of journals, short films and anthologies, including the critically acclaimed New Daughters of Africa, and more recently Nature Matters, an environmental anthology written by the global majority. She has performed internationally and her work has been translated into Spanish, Greek, German and Polish, as well as exhibited at Southbank, Somerset House, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, on Warsaw metro and in New York.

Her first chapbook collection, The Secrets I Let Slip was published in 2015 by Burning Eye Books and is a Poetry Book Society recommendation. She was Young Poet Laureate for London from 2015 to 2016, an award that showcases literary talent across the capital, and shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2019. She is also a 2021 Arts Award Finalist for Environmental Writing. Her full-length collection, A Little Resurrection, also a Poetry Book Society recommendation, was published with Bloomsbury in 2022. It was an Irish Times book of the year and highly commended for the 2023 Forward Prizes.

Her debut essay collection, Black Climates, is an exploration of Blackness and climate justice and will be published by Vintage in August 2025.