Eleanor MacFarlane
Eleanor MacFarlane
Artist Writer Researcher

Website under reconstruction
Website under reconstruction
Sound
I abstract and layer music with recordings to make sound, waves of acoustics which reflect the pulse and cycles of consciousness and memory. Installation, speakers and arrangement within spaces and galleries are opportunities to choose and match the atmosphere for sound.
Voice of a Statue
Streams of people wander through, in and out of my sightline. I sense them. I hear in their chatter the echo of myself.
3 mins of 9 2015 (sound piece for Facsimile moving image)
In sunshine and in shadow
When people get very old, today and yesterday merge into years ago. My mother sings songs from her youth in Ireland, not too sure if I am her daughter or her sister.
3 mins of 1 hour 2014 (sound piece for Embedded moving image)
24 Hour Sibelius
24 Hour Sibelius is music in slow motion. By slowing Sibelius’ seven symphonies we can examine what is sound, what is music, what is noise. Something familiar can be unfamiliar and unknowable. We freeze the moments and step around them, looking, examining, listening. By abstracting Sibelius out of usual time, we can hear it.
We hear the hidden parts of music, the secret dissonances. It’s like looking at it through a magnifying glass, seeing parts normally invisible, hearing the acoustic waves as they form. We get to hear all the noises and silences that go into music, the sound you can hear sitting in the middle of an orchestra, or putting your head against a piano, listening to the echoes slamming around the wood and metal, and the silences, as dark as shadows.
3 mins of 24 hours 2013
Construction
Voices, memories echo, but something beautiful
Something inside of us chooses, chooses to be there
Something elusive: sparkling or signalling, shifting in and out
Of harmony, in and out of dissonance, beauty and dysmorphia
3 mins of 1 hour 2013 (sound piece for Construction moving image)
The Future Past Tense
The sound was made by isolating and then layering harmonies to create waves which roll in and out of synchronisation. As minimalist music repeats and reiterates, so the sound is minimalist.
3 mins of 1 hour 2012 (sound piece for The Future Past Tense moving image)
Moment
The life of a building is not in its stones, but within the elemental. Souls passed here, footsteps walking through time, as we do, leaving traces of our intention. Who is to say that what happens in a moment, the flicker of a candle flame, is not eternal.
3 mins of 15 2009 (sound piece for Moment moving image)
Silver
As if all the elements of silver in the world could communicate with each other on a frequency of their own, bursting into their song when sunlight scatters light on them; thrumming unmined in hills; tooled and buried with the dead. A metalised music, not of human pattern, singing from molecule to molecule, travelling through space.
5 mins 2004