Barbara Ellison

Barbara Ellison is an Irish artist and composer living and working in The Hague. Her work explores ghostly presences and substances in a plethora of sonic and visual realms.

Her live performances often play with ritualistic forms, giving rise to sonic structures emerging through a hypnotic repetitious exploration of simple sound-producing actions.

Through her work and research in ‘Phantoms’, she explores states of auditory and visual ambiguity, working with materials that are either naturally ambiguous or have been ‘composed’ or created to attain this quality. In this way, she exploits the potential for apophenia to manifest, bringing with it what she calls a ‘phantasmatic’ presence.

For the creation of this work, she has developed a syncretic approach that encompasses and coalesces all kinds of sources, materials, techniques and creative tools: from exploring and performing with the sonic intricacies of amplified objects to carrying out field expeditions to different natural environments.

Ellison has performed and presented her work recently at numerous festivals around the world. She has a PhD from the University of Huddersfield, UK (‘Sonic Phantoms’) and currently teaches at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.

This performance is presented in collaboration with Azimuth, an organization for the production and performance of electroacoustic music in the Netherlands.