Hugh has been collecting recordings of streams, rillets, waterfalls and bays to use in a project of sonic portraits. A main river (the Sacramento, the Pearl River, the Housatonic) is portrayed with recordings made at its various tributaries, hiking through the landscape to capture the flow of water and the sonic energy of a space.

In Oakland, Hugh has been following the Oakland Museum's map of Creeks and Watersheds, portraying how the sonic landscape changes in a city with the undergrounding of the natural environment through culverts. Oakland even has artificial attempts to bring the water to the surface, cosmetic solutions to suggest that nature is still allowed to run its course.

The forthcoming series of installations will create a space outlined by the points at which the recordings were made, each represented by a single speaker playing long loops of sound. The relative scale of these points will reflect a reduction of the geographical scale at which they were originally experienced, tailored to the exhibition space.