Hannah Kemp-Welch
Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist with a socially-engaged practice. She produces audio installations and radio broadcasts with community groups, using voices, field recordings and found sounds. She also delivers workshops, makes zines and builds basic radios, aiming to open out sonic practices and technologies for all. Hannah is a member of feminist radio art group Shortwave Collective and the arts cooperative Soundcamp. Hannah has exhibited at Art Gene, Furtherfield, John Hansard Gallery, Kettle's Yard, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Nottingham Contemporary, Tate Britain and Tate Modern. She has also shown work internationally at Chinretsukan Gallery Tokyo, FILE festival Brazil, and TENT Rotterdam Hannah is currently working on a transmission arts project funded through the Developing Your Creative Practice grant, Arts Council England and was on residencies at MoKS (Estonia), Full of Noises (UK) and Buinho Creative Hub (Portugal) in 2021.
My research looks at socially-engaged art and tensions of inequality (class, gender, race and others) deep-rooted in this work. At a time when social art is increasingly commissioned by public sector funders, my research asks – how can listening be used in this practice to negotiate collective aims and aesthetics? This practice-based project will model an activity that stimulates criticality, in order to cultivate a more equitable collaborative practice. This is based around ‘collective listening’, historically promoted by working class self-education initiatives in the 1900s (Rose, 2001) and group listening schemes in the 1930s (Lacey, 2013). Building on my work to date, I will research how collective listening sessions can provide a methodological framework that acknowledges different hearings and facilitates the exchange of cultural references in order to develop a shared aesthetic between participants in social artworks. The project aims to interrogate the context and processes of social art, develop tools for artists, and offer new ways to reconcile issues within the field.