about
Jonathan Crean is a sound artist and performer from the West of Ireland. Through improvised performance, field recording, composition and installation, he explores how sound can be engaged as a way of challenging the human-nature divide which dominates modern Western society. He is interested in deep listening and sound-making approaches that destabilize the human as author, and promote co-creation with/through materials, spaces, and environmental forces.
He collaborates with foraged materials and elemental forces, allowing them to co-create at every stage. Traces of fieldwork and field-being carryover into his performance environments. He engages technologies such as contact microphones, hydrophones, motors, transducers, amplification, and audio filters to reveal and deepen these interactions. The role of human will in his work is continually questioned.
Recent works and performances include the trees have something to say, an ongoing live performance series that utilises gathered materials, contact-miked wood and inductive soundscapes; cycle form, an activated sculpture using water, contact mics and maxMSP; and so they reach back, a film and sound piece exploring embodied encounters with landscape.
image by erin plaice
He holds an MA in Experimental Sound Practice from University College Cork. He is a member of The Fold, a cross-disciplinary group of artists and geologists, and the NCF Artist Collective in Mayo. He is also a founding member of Celtic Reflections, an experimental radio art collective. He runs a monthly experimental music meetup called Accidental Music Club. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, taking part in multiple group and solo shows.
Statement (2025)
I make work out of common ground—a field of mutual becoming.
My practice is guided by a desire to blur the line between human and other-than-human. It rarely begins with sound; it begins with listening. Listening at every stage. And between.
Paths are chosen so listening can become ecological act. Through listening and improvising, common ground is revealed, and a way of moving inside the work:
co-presence rather than authorship,
following rather than controlling,
behaving rather than performing,
being moved as well as moving.
The act of listening has led me to consider the natural materials and forces I engage with—branches, stones, water, moss, air, gravity—not as tools, but as portals into behaviour states—ways of being that ripple through sound.
My hope is to create a space where the human and the more-than-human coalesce—where sound is not produced but arises through relation. A space where:
gestures carry histories
materials hold agency
sound behaves
the body remains porous
and the performance is never anyones.
