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/
