Karen Power
She/Her
Image credit: Frida Sjögren.
Karen Power is an Irish composer/sound artist/improviser, based in Cork, Ireland. Her compositions utilise two primary sources; acoustic instruments and everyday sounds. Karen’s creative output is diverse, both in its approach and delivery, seeking to capture and translate the essence of an idea through a variety of forms, media and methods of dissemination. For example, recent musical works have been presented as sound installations + multi-sensory walk-through experiences, staged orchestral + ensemble pieces, wordless opera, collaborations between sound and dance, sound and image, free + guided improvisations, solo instrumental works, duets, musical happenings + most recently Augmented/Virtual and Expanded Realities.
Every day environments and how we hear every day sounds lies at the core of Karen's practice, with a continued interest in blurring the distinction between what we consider ‘music’ and all other sound. She has listened and recorded in some of the worlds most isolated and challenging locations: The Arctic, Amazon, Namib Desert, Outback Australia and most recently Antartica. Karen’s art utilises our inherent familiarity with such sounds, as a means of engaging with performers and audiences with ambitions of altering our relationship with our world and how are behave and effect change in our living environments. Many of my works are devised to ensure that an active listening environment is created, maintained and shared by all involved. Resulting works simultaneously challenge every listeners memory of hearing while presenting new contexts for such sounds and forever altering how we hear our world, while acknowledging the change we all bring upon it.
Image credit: John Godfrey
For the last decade Karen’s practice has been focused on field recording as a means of bringing every day environments into artistic settings since 2012. As a recipient of a DAAD fellowship in 2015, she focused on developing aural scores + parts, as alternate methods of communication with performers within the context of working with sounds/materials from outside of the Western Art Tradition. Specifically this approach allows performers and environmental sounds/places to come together, so as to temporarily alter the shared performance/listening environment. Many of her recent works have been centred on expanding this approach, often using new and exploratory types of scores and improvisatory techniques, and mostly recently into building expanded instruments.
Developing in a kind of borderless parallel with her compositions is her practice as an improviser and educator. As an improviser, Karen specialises in using environmental/everyday sounds/place as catalysts for constructing new sound-worlds. Such improvisations - whether solo or ensemble - offer unique interactions related to time, sonic sculpting and gesture. Karen’s educational work outside of Tertiary Education focuses on early years and her development of Natural Creators Program, which aims to harness and shape the natural curiosity of our youngest ears.