Barbara Ellison

Barbara Ellison (Ireland/Netherlands) is a sound and visual artist living and working in the Hague. Her practice is interdisciplinary and explores through many mediums a liminal world of the ‘in-between’ – a world where perceptual ambiguity reigns and one which reveals our propensity and desire to detect meaningful and often illusory perceptual patterns in our environment. At the core of her work is a fascination for the physiological and perceptual effects of sound on the body and mind with a particular interest in the process of the ritual and ritualisation. Her performances often play with ritualistic forms giving rise to sonic structures emerging through a hypnotic repetitious exploration of a simple sound-producing action.
These live performances focus on ambiguous and unstable figure/ground relationships aiming to give rise to multistable and illusory hypnotic emergent sonic patterns. She calls such patterns, which are the composed perceptual by-products of her specific compositional and performance working processes, ‘Sonic Phantoms’. She works with any media that may suit the purpose and moves naturally between making films, installations, sculpture, writing text, drawings and performance.
Ellison has performed and presented her work at festivals such as Volumens 2015 Valencia, STÖRUNG Festival 9 Festival, Barcelona, Modern Body Festival, Den Haag, Test Extra Den Haag, OT3, Amsterdam, Liquid Architecture, Melbourne/Sydney and Venice architectural Biennale. She has also undertaken field recording expeditions all over the world – such as Baffin Island, Nunavut, Arctic (2010), Amazon, Brazil (2011), Svaneti, Georgia (2012), Danum Valley rainforest in Borneo (2012), Cardamom rainforest, Cambodia (2013), Mmabolela, South Africa (2013/14/15), Iceland and Australia (2013) & Chile and Bolivia (2015) and the Himalayas (Mustang, Nepal (2016). She has a PhD from the University of Huddersfield, UK (‘Sonic Phantoms’) and co-ordinates and teaches the Sonology Education minor programme (Loco-Lab) at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.