Steve Parker’s live oak tree died the way his father died: slowly, despite care, despite hope, despite diagnoses that sounded too much like oncology. Now the tree performs its own requiem at Ivester Contemporary in the exhibition, Funeral for a Tree, where Parker has transformed its trunk into playable records encoded with the songs of birds that once roosted in its branches. Sheng virtuoso Jipo Yang interprets those calls on a Chinese mouth organ associated with the phoenix, an instrument whose name in Mandarin means life, voice, and sound. Ventilators and CPAP machines breathe through salvaged shengs while wood cookies spin on custom turntables with their grooves checking and fading as the oak dries. The audio on these custom-made records degrades like memory itself. Wood shavings tremble on a bass drum to recorded birdsong. A live oak branch driven by camshaft brushes a wind chime. What Parker has built is liturgical and mechanical at once, a space where the tree’s own material speaks its passing.
Funeral for a Tree closes this Saturday, January 10, at Ivester Contemporary in Austin, Texas. Don’t miss it if you are in the area. Steve can be found via his website HERE and on Instagram HERE.
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What are some of your earliest sound memories? I’m curious about moments from childhood or adolescence that might have planted seeds for the kind of work you make now.
My earliest sound memories are tied to my dad’s record player. I watched it as much as I listened to it.
I still own that turntable, and I’ve used it in a number of installations. I have a really distinct memory of getting hypnotized by that iconic Apple logo on the label of Beatles records.
Music was a constant in our house: Motown, the Beatles, Rolling Stones. My parents grew up in Flint, so Motown especially was woven into our family soundtrack. Some other things I found really embarrassing at the time, too—Enya, Supertramp, Steely Dan. Stuff I now I actually love because it reminds me of my dad.
My dad was a Baptist minister, and growing up, I spent a lot of time in church environments where sound and community were connected. Looking back, what stands out is how collaborative it all was—choirs, spoken word, little theater projects. My parents wouldn’t have called them art projects, but in retrospect, they functioned like a kind of social practice. That experience planted the idea that making performances together can be revelatory, and that few things are emotionally stirring as collective art-making.
Were there particular environments growing up where you felt most attuned to sound? Places where you’d go to listen?
Jazz band in middle school and high school. I had peers a couple of years older than me who were genuine heroes—Amir El-Saffar, who’s now doing really compelling work connecting Iraqi Maqam traditions with trumpet, and Kaz Boyle, who’s an incredibly talented film composer. Watching them improvise was formative. I aspired to do what they were doing.
We also had this great jazz band director, Dr. Ron Holleman, who went by Doc. Doc exposed us to all kinds of great stuff — Zappa arrangements, Don Ellis, old Basie charts, Sun Ra. I’m still in disbelief at how radical he was for a high school band director in the 90s.
Let’s talk about your latest exhibition, Funeral for a Tree, running through January 10 at Ivester Contemporary in Austin. Can you walk me through the moment you realized the tree was dying?
It wasn’t a single dramatic event—it was a slow recognition that arrived in stages.
Early on, I noticed the canopy thinning, and I made this oddly personal connection. It reminded me of the first time I realized I was going prematurely bald in my mid-twenties. Seeing hair in the shower, or on the pages of books while studying. With the tree, it was the same kind of evidence: leaves on the ground, less fullness overhead.
As things worsened, the leaves developed venal necrosis—this striping pattern that signals the tree isn’t getting water and nutrients. We brought in multiple arborists and tried a range of treatments. Around the same time, we started seeing similar symptoms in neighbors’ yards, and our whole family developed this “oak wilt radar.” Part of what made it feel so ominous is how the disease moves: it spreads through interconnected root systems—trees sharing underground networks—traveling roughly 75 to 100 feet per year. Once it has taken hold in a neighborhood, everyone is affected.
When did the connection between your father’s death and the tree’s death become clear to you?
It emerged gradually. At first, the tree reminded me of my own body. But as time went on, it started to evoke what my family experienced when my dad was really sick.
One of the first moments it felt obvious was hearing arborists talk about live oak decline in terms that sounded like “tree cancer.” But even bigger was the process: differing opinions, treatments that would seem to work and then fail, this overwhelming helplessness.
That mirrored what it was like with my dad. His cancer was first misdiagnosed as a urinary tract infection. Then it looked like the surgery worked, but his PSA kept rising. After that, a series of treatments that would help for a while and then ultimately fail. You hope you have the best care, the best doctors. And there’s denial in that—you don’t really grapple with what’s happening until it becomes undeniable.
I didn’t sit with the reality of it until his last few months, when he told me—often in the middle of the night at the ICU—that he was ready to go. He was tired of the treatments, the pain, the embarrassment of needing help to go to the bathroom. My dad was such a strong person, physically and mentally. He ran marathons and did triathlons. When he was really sick, his body was so small, and he could barely swallow. To see him so weak was really difficult.
At the same time, I’m grateful that I was able to spend time with him when he was sick — I felt very close to him. I know that is a luxury not everyone has.
How did you decide which migratory bird species to encode into the wood cookies?
There are a lot of migratory species that roost in live oaks in this area—it’s actually an important place for migration. So the decisions started with research, mostly through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and conversations with birders.
The audio on the records aren’t strictly field recordings, though. They’re bird songs I provided to a shēng virtuoso—Jipo Yang, a friend of mine in Taipei. Jipo interpreted the calls on his instrument and performed short compositions around them.
I only created seven records, so I had to make hard choices. It came down to personal connection—especially the grackle, which feels iconic in Austin—and a few others whose calls I found sonically interesting.
What’s the physical process of cutting the trunk into playable records?
Like many of my projects, there’s collaboration involved. I had to find a sawmill to cut the trunk into slices, then had to experiment to figure out how to make it playable. I tested CNC routers and laser cutters at a makerspace with some success, but it wasn’t until I worked with Justin Shelton—who’s helped me on previous public art pieces—that I got the precision I needed.
A record is a pretty simple object: a spiral around the center, and along that spiral is essentially a waveform realized at the rate of playback—78 RPM in my case. But there are always challenges in simplicity. In this case, groove depth, thickness, distance between grooves, angle of the stylus. Lots of moving parts and experimentation.
What struck me emotionally was that after cutting these discs, they looked like permanent relics—almost like gravestones. And the beauty of the wood itself: the checking, the changes in grain, all the characteristic things that make live oak so interesting. Live oak trees are twisted and gnarly. They give this region its particular charm, and that feature is revealed in the slices.
You mention that as the wood dries and checks, the audio fades and distorts. Did you anticipate that?
Not exactly. I originally thought I’d use the lesions in the wood as a score to generate material for the kinetic installation. But the more I experimented, it didn’t translate clearly—it was too subject to interpretation. It wasn’t until a few weeks in that I came to the idea of encoding the discs with actual record grooves.
I did know that working with live oak was going to be unpredictable. Every woodworker I spoke with said some version of the same thing: beautiful wood, but extremely temperamental. Several refused to work with me because it’s so difficult.
But that makes the piece more captivating to me—the fact that the information encoded into the material is temporary, like a fading memory. The passage of time is a theme throughout this project.
What drew you to the sheng specifically?
The shēng is now my favorite instrument. Sonically, it casts a spell—this weird combination of something synthetic but also acoustic. It sounds otherworldly. And what players can do with it surpasses anything I’ve heard on any other instrument, maybe with the exception of piano.
There’s also a poetic layer in the language. In Mandarin, “shēng” is a cluster of homophones: 笙 is the instrument, 生 means “life” or “to be born,” and 聲 means “sound” or “voice.” That overlap—life, voice, sound—already describes what this project is trying to do.
FYI, I’m studying Mandarin, but I definitely had to look up those characters.
And the history: it’s inspired by the myth of the phoenix, the form representing a wing. What I love is how simple it is structurally—bamboo with reeds adhered by melted beeswax—given that it’s capable of so much.
How do ventilators and CPAP machines change the meaning of breath in this context?
For anyone who’s been with a loved one at the edge of death—or the edge of birth—it changes how you listen to breathing.
I think it’s safe to say that we don’t listen closely to each other’s breath on a regular basis. But at the beginning and end of life, I found that I would listen almost obsessively. When my kids were born, we were constantly checking to make sure they were still breathing. When my dad was really sick, we monitored his breathing to assess his comfort, to sense where his body was going.
Those machines carry obvious medical associations—they’re used when someone needs to be saved. But in this context, they bring you back to those thresholds. Fundamentally, the piece is about breath, and about giving breath.
Can you describe what it’s like to stand in the gallery when all these elements are sounding together?
Initially, when I combined everything, the sculptures were far too active. So there’s tension in the exhibition, and also a lot of silence. Everything sounds deliberate and delicate—more like fragments than continuous music. Fragments of melodies, fragments of bird calls. In that balance, the space starts to feel reverent. Like a sanctuary. Quasi-liturgical.
There’s such tenderness in these mechanical gestures—the branch brushing a wind chime, the bass drum with wood shavings responding to birdsong. How do you think about the relationship between mechanism and emotion?
I think it comes down to being sensitive to the materials. With the tree branch, I’m identifying what gestures feel expressive—what motion can carry emotion without me forcing it.
That’s especially true with the ventilators. They’re noisy devices, and because they’re decommissioned, even noisier than usual. I’m using the sounds they already want to make: the clicks of tiny relays, the grunts of air pumps that almost sound like snores, the wheezing as air pushes through the reeds.
The relationship between mechanism and emotion comes down to being true to the material—letting it dictate what it wants to say. I think that’s where the emotion reveals itself.
What does it mean to you that this is a requiem the tree performs for itself?
If I perform a requiem for the tree, it’s filtered through my choices and interpretation. When the tree is the source material, it feels like the work is closer to letting the tree speak.
And there’s the sacred connotations of using parts of the body—breath, touch, stillness as ways we honor living things. This is creating a situation where the tree’s own material, and the act of breaking it apart, listening, breathing with it, becomes the ritual.
Lastly, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
My favorite sound only exists in memory now. It’s the sound both my kids made as newborns—the little sound they’d make drinking milk from a bottle while I rocked them to sleep. This tiny, tender clicking of the glottis.
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