When A Far Cry and curator Rafael Popper-Keizer invited Christine Arveil to create a site-specific installation for Heart Strings, the intention was clear: to shape a visual environment that would support deeper listening.
For Arveil, whose work explores beauty, vulnerability, and resilience beyond distress, the question wasn’t how to illustrate love—but how to inhabit it. “Perhaps that is why music and poetry exist,” she writes, “not to explain love, but to live inside it.”
Before building anything, Christine listened—again and again—to the music on the program. Drawn to its meditative quality, she began imagining the stage as a kind of garden: a place where sound could breathe, musicians could feel supported, and the audience’s gaze could wander without distraction.
Her installation brings together live flowers, reclaimed wood, and transparent sculptural forms. Industrial offcuts and discarded materials are carefully cleaned and repurposed alongside organic elements gathered from nature, revealing beauty in what is often overlooked. The tension between the manufactured and the natural mirrors the emotional range of the concert itself—fragile and strong, durable and ephemeral.
At the heart of the installation is a nine-foot sliver of bark and core wood, salvaged by hand from a fallen tree along the Charles River. After weeks of careful reinforcement using natural methods, the piece now appears to hover—light, balanced, and full of quiet movement.
While honoring the solemn architecture of Jordan Hall, Arveil’s installation gently loosens it. Custom stands echo the hall’s wood paneling, transparent structures soften the divide between stage and audience, and an ancient volcanic basalt—The Builder—stands as a tribute to those who built and care for the space.
In a world that can feel fractured and rushed, Arveil sees art not as an escape, but as a way of standing more attentively in the world. For one night, Heart Strings invites listeners into that shared attention—where music, materials, and presence come together in an expression of love.
Get your tickets now for Heart Strings at Jordan Hall on February 14th (Valentine’s Day) at 7:30PM.
