My artistic response to this workshopping came in the form of the project Energy Extraction. My disaster ballad is a doom-metal trudge that lasts for thirty minutes from start to finish. I am a professional performer on the sousaphone - an American low-brass instrument - which requires strong lungs and copious breath. My disaster ballad was specifically crafted in response to the Sago Mine Disaster, but since researching mine disasters around the world, I often find a common cause for death is carbon monoxide asphyxiation. During the performance, another condenser microphone in the room picks up low-frequency, high-amplitude signals and processes them into a dual-video projection of footage of mine disasters interlaced with entertainment media. But the consciousness of the video stream is subject to YouTube's algorithms as it logically jumps to the next video during the thirty-minute performance. I view my breath as a battery and a filter[1].

In December 2019, I conducted research with the Belgrade Artists in Residence in Belgrade, Serbia with coal mining communities in Sokobanja and Aleksinački Rudnik to find out whether Serbia had a tradition of disaster ballads commemorating similar explosions that killed miners in those communities. Definitively, after interviews with former miners and their wives, I came to find out the relationship between mineworkers and operations were much different than the company towns of Appalachia. It seems as these disasters occurred during the predominate communist era of the country that mineworkers were more apt to blame themselves for those disasters rather than speak out against the mine operators. I had the unfortunate experience of attending my partner's father's funeral in Kruševac and observed that singing about death, even as a form of commemoration, may be less acceptable than the culture of folk music in Appalachia. 

As part of the exhibition, I performed a set of Appalachian disaster ballads and workshopped with community members on expressions of grief.

I grew up going performing at and attending punk shows held at the Hodgesville Community Center outside of Buckhannon, WV. These events were a community gathering full of energy and protest for the dark world gathering around us. But we never knew, never sang about the disasters occurring in our own state and to our own fathers and brothers because our minds were filled with the problems outside our locality.

Once I became fully aware of the history of coal in West Virginia, and the Sago Mine Disaster of 2006 occurring also just outside Buckhannon really bringing to light the fatalism of our region, I turned to studying disaster ballads. I found that women like Jean Ritchie and Hazel Dickens were doing the punk-rock thing by writing songs of protest, calling out the culture of coal mining that preyed on masculinity and patriarchy. I began performing a collection of disaster ballads publicly to generate discussion about the coal industry, but also more broadly about working with communities to develop their own ideas on how to remember and express collective loss and pain.