RACHEL SHEARER




Rachel Shearer is an audio-visual artist based in Auckland. Her work with sound traverses a range of fields including recording and performing experimental music, audio-visual installation, writing, research, and collaboration with other practitioners of moving image and performance.

Rachel’s cross-disciplinary practice is united by a common theme, frequently featuring manipulated recordings of environmental sounds. She regularly performs sets of solo electronics and also has a history of collaboration, including a number of projects alongside the likes of Rosy Parlane, Ducklingmonster, and Richard Francis. Rachel’s collaborative inclinations and professional background in film production have lead to her compositing and sound-editing for a number of award-winning short and feature films, television shows, documentaries and contemporary dances. Since the late 1980s, Rachel’s musical projects have been published by leading labels throughout the world, with material released by the likes of Xpressway, Flying Nun, Ecstatic Peace!, Corpus Hermeticum and Family Vineyard, among others. She been the author and topic of a number of texts printed by a range of significant journals and magazines, and Auckland's vibrant, metropolitan soundscape has played host to Rachel’s subtle interventions for public spaces on a number of occasions (notably in Albert Park and the Wynyard Quarter), while her work for gallery spaces has been presented at institutions in Aotearoa – New Zealand, Australasia and the Pacific, Asia, and Europe.

Rachel holds a PhD from Auckland University of Technology. Her research, Te Oro o te Ao: the Resounding of the World (2018), investigated earth-energies and environmental recording through a lens of Māori epistemologies, exploring the structures and patterns of ecological processes through multi-channel sound installations. This project produced analogues of natural processes, positioning ecology as a model of interconnected and interdependent systems against which parallels found within Māori epistemologies, including concepts of whakapapa and whanaungatanga, were developed and explored.

Rachel currently works at the Auckland University of Technology at the School of Future Environments, where she lectures on culture, technology and sound.


LINKS:
Vibrating Matter, Studies in Material thinking (Volume 5)
https://www.materialthinking.org/papers/55

Te Oro o te Ao: the Resounding of the World
http://openrepository.aut.ac.nz/handle/10292/11712

Rachel Shearer on CIRCUIT
https://www.circuit.org.nz/

Rachel Shearer
http://rachelshearer.com/