Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist who like Fari Bradley works in multiple disciplinary fields at once, such as installations, broadcasting, field recordings, zine-making, and workshops to name some.
What really caught my eye about Hannahs’s work was the collective she is a part of called the ‘Shortwave Collective’. The shortwave collective is a feminist group that has people from all around the world involved, shortwave is interested in the creative use of radio. For so many reasons I found this to be such an incredible idea, sadly it is still hard for women to get their voices heard in sound art and the genres that surround it. Though it’s still constantly growing there is a lot of movement to go ahead. I found this a good way for women to collide minds and share their interest in creative radio production and show people that this is something we need more of. So far they have released a couple projects, the one that I found the most interesting was a piece called ‘Receive-Transmit-Receive. This is a compilation of radio transmission during 2020 when covid was running rampid across the globe. The piece consists of amateurs, international stations, met reports, naval communications, and continuous-wave code. This is their first collaborative piece and what a piece to start off on. I found this such an inspiration as an artist, especially when it comes to collaboration and what you can do if you collide minds with other artists.
Overall I found Hannah to be one of the most interesting practitioners we have had to date, from the wide array of fields they work in, to the shortwave collective. I think Hannah is a pioneer of feminist sound art and I can’t wait to see what she does next. As someone who works in a collective with a mix of genders, I found what she did to be really creative and boundary-pushing and it made me think of what we could do to our own collective.
References
Shortwave Collective. (n.d.). Receive-Transmit-Receive. [online] Available at: https://www.shortwavecollective.net/receive-transmit-receive.html
Shortwave Collective. (n.d.). Shortwave Collective. [online] Available at: https://www.shortwavecollective.net/