Dawn Scarfe is an artist whose work investigates resonance, perception and environmental atmospheres. She works across a variety of media and contexts including site-specific installation, performance and field recording. Recent exhibitions include Klinkende Stad Kortrijk, ZKM Karlsruhe, Q-O2 Brussels, La Casa Encendida Madrid, TONSPUR Museumsquartier Vienna, Bios Athens and 176 Zabludowicz Collection, London. For comprehensive information please visit: http://www.dawnscarfe.co.uk
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ER. Can you describe some of the main themes and pre occupations behind your work?
DS.’Sensitivity’ is an ongoing concern, how people or things respond to changes in their surroundings. I’m interested in how the sound of particular atmospheres can seem to convey an emotional charge, and I’m drawn to instruments that are thought to extend the senses.

ER. Do you know when/where this interest began?
DS. It’s partly because I’m aware of the quirks and limits of my own senses that I find the detail of how we hear…

1 | Thoreau.
Put Walden down, now. You haven’t ‘just discovered’ how Thoreau was, like, totally ahead of R. Murray Schafer.  That pond is teeming with hydrophones at this stage.

Unimpressed: Thoreau

2 | Contact microphones and melting ice, or the go-to first timer experiment the moment the kit is unboxed.

3 | The pensive, looking-in-the-distance-while-monitoring biog shot. This one’s fairly unavoidable. We’ve all been there.

4 | Soundmaps. As apps and GPS make the collection of a ginormous amount of mediocre-to-atrocious quality sounds possible from all conceivable sources including your granny’s Nokia, this really isn’t worth pursuing any further. Moving on.

5 | Tweeting exclusively about your ‘Upcoming Releases’ on that label (what was it again…oh, right. The one set up by you.)  Zero likes.

6 | Bells. In the wise words of professional recording Gandalf Mikael Fernstrom: ‘Every sound student has his Quasimodo moment’. Let it…

Many of you will be familiar with John Cage’s famous 10 Rules for Students and Teachers from 1968, which are a constant source of inspiration.  Recently I have come across a similar set of good advice through a different discipline (painting). This blog post recirculated the advice of Irwin Greenberg, a teacher at the High School of Art & Design and the Art Students League of New York who passed away in 2009 age 87.  Although we work with audio and not visual arts, I believe some of the best tips and advice can come from cross-pollination with other disciplines, and as such I dived into the long list (100!) to find a lot of advice easily applicable to any creative pursuit. Some I don’t necessarily agree with, but others are great.  The 10 I have picked and listed below are the ones that in my opinion are wonderful advice and encouragement for us sound artists…