Iris Garrelfs is an artist working on the cusp of music, art and sociology. Her practice includes fixed media, installation, improvised performance and has been included in major institutions worldwide, for example Tate Britain, National Gallery, Visiones Sonores Mexico, MC Gallery New York. Several of her works have just been nominated for the British Composer of the Year Award (Sonic Art).
Elsewhere she is the commissioning editor of the online journal Reflections on Process in Sound and the co-curator and director of Sprawl, a London based experimental music organisation. Iris has a PhD in Sound Art from University of the Arts London where she also works as a researcher and lecturer.
She is interested in modes of listening as a way of connecting to the world, exploring interrelatedness, patterns and interaction through performances, mixed media projects, and recordings. As a result she focuses on working with site. However, her approach to site-specificity does not mean work is created for a particular locale, nor does the work represent a place, but rather, it is a response to it. She includes people in my understanding of place, people who, through their ideas or presence, participate in creating it. And so Iris’ responses are not an investigation of the geographical, historic or sociological aspects of site, but rather, it is a poetic evocation of presence on the one hand and presence within a space or situation on the other.
Garrelfs is a composer/performer intrigued by change, fascinated with voices and definitely enamoured by technology. As one of the pioneers of digitally augmented vocal performance, Iris often uses her voice as raw material, which she transmutes into machine noises, choral works or pulverised “into granules of electroacoustic babble and glitch, generating animated dialogues between innate human expressiveness and the overt artifice of digital processing” as the Wire Magzine put it.
