“The immaterial is my favorite material”: Hyd and Tourmaline in Conversation

Until last week, it had been nearly four years since Hayden Dunham presented a full body of work under the project Hyd. In the meantime, the Los Angeles-based artist, musician, and performer was showing her alchemical, sculpture-based works—which reflect on the primordial conditions of life, the cosmos, and their technological vectors—at venues such as the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea and Company Gallery in New York, where the artist’s solo exhibition “NEVER IS OVER” is on view through June 13.

Comprised of a floating, mobile-like constellation constructed from charcoal, filaments, lilies, and personal notes; a crystalline ladder that descends from the ground-floor gallery to the basement gallery; and a series of seven tangled sculptures enshrouding recording devices that hold the voices of friends, partners, and influences, including Octavia Butler, Pippa Garner, Radclyffe Hall, and Sophie Xeon, “NEVER IS OVER” bellows the artist’s belief in the law of reunion.

That same conviction is at the center of her sophomore Hyd album, Hold Onto Me Infinity, which she revealed in an intimate listening event at Company two days before the project’s worldwide release on May 22 via Cascine. Carrying angels, elemental forces, and a shifting sense of time—and of course, the phygital drums and synths associated with PC Music, the label where she forged her sound—the album is in many ways the haptic, sonic counterpart to “NEVER IS OVER.”

This is especially true on the song “Makeover,” the collaboration with the late SOPHIE (Sophie Xeon) that the two made while dating in the 2010s. The track’s lyrics echo the tongue-in-cheek, product-centric newness (“New car, new style, new activewear / New face, new body, new health regime”) at the heart of QT, her debut musical project with A. G. Cook and SOPHIE. Its reappearance a decade after its premiere at a SOPHIE gig more than obliterates the distance between past and present. It also breaks the protective casing we often form in death’s wake, the same casing materialized in Dunham’s sculpture on view at Company that houses a recording of Xeon’s voice. The result of her unearthing is volcanic, turning the immaterial material and the departed present, even if only for a moment.

On the eve of the release of Hold Onto Me Infinity, Hyd was joined in conversation by activist, artist, filmmaker, and writer Tourmaline, who recently published Martha (2025), the first expansive biography on Marsha P. Johnson. Coming seven years after Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2018), the artist’s short film made in collaboration with Sasha Wortzel, the book is a continuation of Tourmaline’s two-decade research commitment to the life of the activist, performer, and cornerstone of the historic 1969 Stonewall Uprising and the subsequent founding of organizations such as the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), and the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). Equally an extension of the visual work she’s shown at the Whitney and Venice Biennales, and in solo and group presentations at Kunsthalle Brandhorst, MASP Sao Paulo, MUDAM Luxembourg, MASS MoCA, the Tate Modern, and Chapter New York over the years, Marsha reflects the expansive, care-based practice of its author, as it does her conversation partner, Dunham.

Hyd: You can hold a frequency here that is not something that can be seen, but something that can be felt and then integrated into every part of life. I wanted to talk to you about how that came into your practice, with writing and making.

Tourmaline: Writing, to me, has been the most clear way to do that. But it’s carried over from the writing, where at any moment I get to ask myself, “Where am I in relation to that feeling?” And I can tell, internally, where I am based off of what’s showing up. How about for you? Because you are crafting with the immaterial all the time.

Hyd: The immaterial is my favorite material. A lot of my album was written in different places that are sacred and charged to me. Places where I can be receptive, like my bedroom that I had with my former partner. A lot of the album was written in Iceland. The whole thing is trying to find a way to be receptive to what’s coming through and not try to hold it too tightly, because there are different channels you can tune into.

Tourmaline: I’ve come to an understanding that all of it is important data.

I’m curious, because you did Clearing on another volcanic island, if there is something about the space being in formation.

Hyd: I get really excited about energy processes. Volcanic energy is this incredible pressure, coming to the surface and releasing steam and gas and this material transforming from the inside to outside. I feel aligned with that in my process of making work, so I wanted to be led by earth with Clearing. When I started working on Hold Onto Me Infinity, I thought, I need to go back to a place where the immaterial becomes material and something else. I really wanted it to be a place where I felt embodied and inside of myself. So this album was sort of a trial and error.

I’m working on this show at Company [Gallery] in New York called “NEVER IS OVER.” One of the series involves recording people who I have been close to, who are no longer in their physical form. These sculptures are light reactive, so if light touches the speaker, it will activate and release the sounds. I was listening to these interviews of Octavia Butler, messages from my brother who passed, long conversations I recorded between me and my dear one Pippa Garner, and eventually Marsha P. Johnson. I listened to every interview I could find of her voice.

I was thinking about how there are so many ways of listening. There are the literal words that you're listening to, there’s also a frequency that's coming through. But as I was recording Hold Onto Me Infinity, I was going into files from 2016, 2017 that SOPHIE and I made and where I could hear her voice speaking in the background or singing over different parts of the song. And there’s one song on Hold Onto Me Infinity that I decided to keep her voice in. The thought of taking her voice out of it was impossible for me.

It’s so special, the way sound moves and can be held in these waves, where, even without the physical body of a person, that being can be held through these waves. I was thinking about you when I was listening to Marsha. I know you two are so close, deeply-connected inter-dimensionally. What does it feel like when you hear her?

Tourmaline: It feels similar and different because my relationship with her existed only in the immaterial, whereas you and Sophie were partners and there was the transition from material into immaterial. There are moments when I can tell, Oh, Marsha is here. I’m calibrated to my awareness of that presence in a felt, internal way. Sometimes that happens in a dream, or sometimes through writing. And it happened with Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2018), when I was writing the script, because I writing all this dialogue then Sasha [Wortzel] and I got an invitation from this NYU professor of film to see some short documentary that he made with Marsha in February 1991—and it was filled with all of these lines that I had never heard Marsha say, but in the process of writing, I had put into the dialogue because of just being tuned into it. I really have come to believe that we all have this capacity to tune into these frequencies, and we’re doing it all the time, whether through our intuition or the voice in our head.
There’s always another bit of a Marsha interview to find. After a 20-year [research] process, I would think that I’d found it all. In the process of writing this biography, I found this almost two-hour radio interview that she did right after her husband, Thomas Gerald Davis, had been killed. She’s in real grief, and also simultaneously hilarious. Being tuned to that [frequency] also makes me think about the inside coming out. It recalls when you and I were both awoken by an earthquake when we were in Japan.

Hyd: I love it when the Earth speaks. I really look to the Earth for advice about how to be here and how to integrate—things like grief, transformation, new forms of being, looking at the petals dropped from bouquets in my house that then transform into seeds.

It was so extraordinary getting to experience this, even that moment of being shaken up, where you really become aware of her presence and power. There was a period of time where my life was really turbulent and I was looking at the roots of plants and how they stay grounded when the wind is coming endlessly, the rain is coming endlessly. I visited this biome in Cornwall in the UK which had these plants that were held in really shallow soil beds. If I walked past them, they would fall over. I learned that it was the wind that made them strong. It was actually the turbulence that strengthened their capacity to hold the ground.

Tourmaline: Are there particular tracks where you feel that in this album? Or, do you think a root system extends throughout the entire album?

Hyd: Making this body of work has been this incredible scaffolding for me to move through this time. Clearing operated in the same way. I made Clearing in a calm time in my life, but whenever it touched the air, it felt like a past version of me made it for a future version of me.

Hold Onto Me Infinity holds that for me too. [It’s] the thing that has been supportive of me connecting with and celebrating what it is to have a body. And as you know Tourmaline, I have not always been like this. I feel like I have been more in an airspace, an in-between space, or not fully embodied.

Tourmaline: Do you feel like you can pinpoint any “aha” moments—I remember the end of 2019 was a moment where I was like, oh, everything is vibrational, and it was so overwhelming—for this place that you’re in now?

Hyd: 2016 is when I first started working on this song “Makeover.” The song came through really fast. Some of the lyrics are about becoming new again, like “1-800, this ain’t working at all.” There was a moment where I needed to be reminded that anything can change at any moment, towards expansion and and towards feeling really.

Then, strangely, almost 10 years later, I found the files for this song, opened them and found these additional lyrics that I had written in 2016 with SOPHIE. They were about moving between timelines. Like, after we leave Earth, do we get to come back again? Is life in that way we knew before complete, or do we get to change forms again? And I realized that this song wasn’t about a physical makeover. It was about, on a soul level, being able to come back again. This was a real lightning moment for me where I realized that, again, we’re not held into one specific timeline. We get to be more expansive than our singular one form.

That’s when I realized that this body of work had actually already come through. I had already received it. It was done. I just had to let it go, have soft hands, and trust and surrender to the process. Those surrender moments where you don’t know but you just choose to trust—that’s when really strange, freaky things can happen. And I think all this work is a teacher where I get to be a student listening and trying to be more sensitive. It’s not like a fantasy or something like that. It’s a real thing that is happening, Earth-side and beyond.

I have a question for you now. Something that I have witnessed you do over and over again throughout our friendship is having a wild vision and bringing it into the physical. Is there a practice that you have [for this]?

Tourmaline: What I found is, if I can conjure the emotion, everything else fills in around it. And that sounds so vague, but if I can have feeling, the whole thing speeds up. That’s really my process. How about for you?

Hyd: I’m having that experience right now with the album. I have never been naturally gifted, or there are a lot of things that I had never been before that I then became by just doing them. Sometimes the fear of not doing something right or well can keep you from doing it, but the practice of being willing to see yourself in a way that you haven’t before—and the way that you know is true, that is resonant on a deep level but can’t be seen—just becomes. That is true of this body of work, where sometimes you just have to keep moving through with faith, with holding the vision when it’s not clear to other people. It’s interesting to try to consolidate it into language because it’s this thing outside of language.

Tourmaline: It’s like a gardener having faith that the seed is going to turn into a fully-formed, beautiful flower. It’s a leap of faith, the belief that just because it hasn’t happened before or we weren’t living it before doesn’t mean that we can’t usher it in right now. I was having the same thought when I got out of the shower this morning, about the difference between where I was and where I am right now. So much of that [difference] is in just doing the thing even when it’s bad, or getting that first draft done, or showing up on set.

Hyd: 100%. At some point that seed will be able to push through the ground and touch the sun. You’re bringing the water to the seed, but also rain happens—there’s a part of it that you don’t have to do, that you just trust.