Featuring Patrick Kukucka, Sleep Number, Farewell Phoenix, and Ash Sierra
Free and Open to All
Join us for an evening of poetry + music co-curated by Drones in the Garden, an experimental art collective creating seasonal performance platforms for WNC musicians and writers. This community event will explore the sonic dimensions of collage, and will also feature a floating botanical collage installation created through community collaboration.
This performance is presented in conjunction with Black Mountain COLL(A)GE (May 29 – September 5, 2026), an exhibition exploring medium, method, and memory.
About Drones in the Garden:
With a need for outdoor and open-air events, Drones in the Garden formed in October 2021 when Patrick Kukucka of Bagatelle Books proposed that Lynn Fister curate shows in the garden space behind Flora and Bagatelle in Asheville, North Carolina. Sophie Hull immediately joined forces with production and curation, alongside Static Age Records. Since then, DITG has produced many events seasonally for regional artists, as well as completing residencies and being featured at BMCM+AC’s {Re}HAPPENING 12 at the historic Lake Eden campus. DITG does pop-up events, but has mostly transitioned into hosting quarterly shows at Ritual Botanica, a beautiful studio surrounded by plants.
Their mission is to elevate the possibilities of experimental performance space, creating botanical installations to explore how space/performance inform and re-contextualize the listening experience. They focus on local musicians and writers, hoping to build bridges for our small avant-garde art community in Asheville, NC.
DITG is centered on left-field music and a community-oriented ethos. It is an all artist-run cooperative. It seeks a multi-disciplinary approach that embraces the sometimes untamed beauty of nature and sound.
Read more about the collaborators below. (Photo credits: All polaroids from Sophie Hull’s camera. Hull took photos of Lynn and Patrick. Eric (Rodent) Cheslak took the image of Sophie.)
Farewell Phoenix is the experimental music project of Vietnamese-American artist, video animator, writer, composer and synthesist Lynn Nguyen Fister. Lynn has an all-encompassing approach to her practice, forging artforms to often create surreal, sometimes escapist or allegorical experiences, recontextualizing and informing the disciplines through new lenses.
She has been creating installations since 2008 using found natural materials both in galleries and private spaces, such as in her home and on her body. In 2016, Lynn started making “abandoned” spaces out of her art, found objects, her home, and since then in gallery spaces.
In her music project Farewell Phoenix, she often combines layered and processed choral vocals, often sampled with granular and modular synthesis techniques, feedback noise and field recordings. She has completed residencies and also been commissioned to score music.
Sleep Number is the experimental music project arranged by Sophie Hull, that merges heavy drone, field recordings, noise and driving vocals with synth-laden soundscapes & occasional guitar. Blurring the line between waking and sleeping, this music is crafted to pull listeners into a deep, immersive state of mind. With each track, Sleep Number guides audiences into a place where the familiar dissolves, drawing from influences that transform textural noise into a layered journey. Featuring comforting, vibrational, warm vocals, like an echo you know is close by in a mountain valley.
Sophie Hull is a Western North Carolina–based visual artist and musician by way of New York. She began studying documentary and studio darkroom photography at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in Manhattan at age 15. After graduating with a degree in sociology from Temple University, she relocated to Asheville in 2015. At this time Sophie stepped away from photojournalism to pursue music and deepen her illustration and various design practices. The shift from city life to the Blue Ridge Mountains fostered a more inward form of expression, shaped by fewer external stimuli. In recent years, her visual artwork has expanded to include screen printing, graphic design, and line-based drawing. Sophie is a multi-disciplinary artist and co-founder of Drones In The Garden, an experimental music, visual art, and writer based community focused arts collective.
Patrick Kukucka is the owner of Bagatelle Books. Offering both used and new books at the store, he specializes in a unique and rare collection. He also hosts shows at Bagatelle, is a sound technician and performs thoughtful and warm ambient soundscapes as Falcon Mitts.
Ash Alexandria Sierra is an artist and plant devotee whose work explores what it means to seek the numinous within the seemingly mundane. Ash has long approached art as a mode of inquiry and meaning-making. Drawing from depth psychology, alchemical thought, and eco-herbalism, their recent practice investigates aromatics and story to invoke the imaginal through which the symbolic life of the psyche becomes perceptible, strengthening a relational participation with the living world.
Ash became involved with DITG several years ago after opening their apothecary, Ritual Botanica, to host these events. At a moment when increasingly more thinking, creating, and remembering is outsourced to machines, Ritual Botanica has evolved into a gathering place where creatives and seekers come together to make and participate in shared experience. The space is grounded in the belief that tending artistic exploration and experiences that expand our ways of perceiving are primary means of cultivating soul, culture, and community.
Photo credits: All polaroids from Sophie Hull’s camera. Hull took photos of Lynn and Patrick. Eric (Rodent) Cheslak took the image of Sophie. Photo of Ash + Sophie from a 2026 DITG event.