Dawn Scarfe
Dawn Scarfe’s work involves tuning into things. She uses devices such as ‘bivvy broadcasts’ and ‘listening glasses’ to explore fragile connections between people, places and sound. Dawn’s work is concerned primarily with instruments that extend our senses, exploring ways of working between different urban sites and the surrounding countryside, coalescing around the provisional theme ‘out of place’.
“Listening is an important aspect of my work, It is the means I use to engage with places and people, to discover relations and exchanges that might be invisible or unseen. I work with sound because it is a time-based medium, which allows me to explore elements of transience and resonance.“
She co-curates SoundCamp: an annual international festival of sound and ecology with a base at Stave Hill in Rotherhithe, and Reveil: a live, crowd sourced, 24hr broadcast of daybreak sound.
Other collaborations include remote exchanges with B-PLOT (NY) and Jiyeon Kim (SEL). Her compositions have been aired on BBC Radio 3 and Resonance FM. She has shown work at Café Oto, Union Chapel, Tate Modern, Full of Noises, Q02, ZKM, La Casa Encendida, Museumquartier Vienna, and New Mart Seoul. Residencies include an 'Embedded' programme with Sound and Music and Forestry Commission England, and MoKS Centre for Art and Social Practice Estonia.
She has developed workshops with SLG’s Art Assassins, the School of Noise, Hackney, Ruskin School of Art and many others. Dawn has contributed texts to Performance Research, Uniformbooks, Leonardo, Soundscape, Environmental Sound Artists (Oxford University Press) and Sound Art (ZKM). She holds a PhD in Sonic Arts and MMus composition from Goldsmiths University of London, and a BA in Fine Art from Oxford Brookes University.