Hope Spring

Max Eastley is an artist whose work combines kinetic sound sculpture and music to produce a unique art form. Since the late 1960s, Eastley has been fascinated by the relationship of chance to music and art, and in environmental forces such as wind and water. He began to investigate this relationship in his work, using kinetic sound machines and the natural forces of the wind, streams and the sea. As a consequence, his career opened out into new areas of creative and philosophical exploration. Eastley is an important and innovative figure in the field of sound art. He often works in collaboration with other artists from a range of disciplines. He has exhibited his sound installations internationally, and worked closely with a wide range of artists, musicians and filmmakers, including Brian Eno, Peter Greenaway, Evan Parker, Thomas Köner, Eddie Prévost and The Spaceheads. Exhibitions of his installations in 2000 included Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery and Sound as Media in Toyko. In 2002 he composed the music for Plants and Ghosts by Siobhan Davies Dance. He has worked with musician and writer David Toop to produce the critically acclaimed albums New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments 1975, Buried Dreams 1994 and Doll Creature 2004. For The Ship Eastley has produced a sound sculpture installation which incorporates found sound recorded during Cape Farewell expeditions. 'I'm a musician and a sound artist, and I'm here on the boat to collect as many different sounds as I can: sounds the ship makes, water sounds, birdcalls, seal songs, that kind of thing. I do an awful lot of recording all over the place and I've never heard anything like the sounds I've heard on this voyage. We went to a kittiwake colony - a huge city of seabirds all nesting on the side of a cliff - and that was absolutely fantastic.' (Max Eastley, Cape Farewell 2003 Voyage)

Cfr. nn. Arch. 184.24, 185.17