In Nature and Her Laws Benson continues her examination of notions of exile and marginalization, here looking specifically at nature’s exile.

Begun at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic during the spring of 2020, Benson works with excerpts from The System of Nature (1770) by Holbach (published, however, under the pseudonym Mirabaud), a haunting philosophical work that highlights humankind’s alienation from nature and that profoundly resonates in today’s world. Benson’s reading of the revolutionary text during a time in which the fragilities of nature were paramount has prompted her own personal search for a new landscape and relationship with nature. Through her found, text-derived score based on relevant passages, Benson then creates an interdisciplinary dialogue that manifests itself in a sound-based component and color field prints. In the lyrical and moving Nature and her Laws (2020), Benson used the punctured text to create a musical score that is reduced in scale, rolled into long scrolls and then played on a hand-crank piano on her New York rooftop during the dawn hours of the lockdown. The audio captures the sound of the score being played on the piano, accentuated by the city’s own dawn chorus—not just the hum of awakening birds but also a newly altered pandemic-induced urban rhythm, including the eerie, quiet absence of traffic punctuated by last spring’s ubiquitous and painfully familiar sirens of ambulances.