Alexandra Spence

About

Alexandra Spence is an artist and musician from Sydney, Australia. She makes installations, compositions and performances based on (everyday) sound and listening.

Alex's art and music explores the idea of listening as active practice, examining the ways in which our individual notions of place and identity are shaped and mediated through sound. Through her practice she attempts to reimagine the intricate relationships between the listener, the object, and the surrounding environment as a kind of communion or conversation. With an interest in resonance, vibration and everyday sound, her aesthetic favours small sounds, object interventions, and unusual sound sources (she holds the pseudo-scientific belief that electricity might actually be magic).

Alex has performed and presented work in concerts, festivals, symposiums, galleries and on radio in Australia, Canada, Europe, and Asia including the Vancouver Art Gallery; Destroy Vancouver; Late Junction, BBC Radio3; Engineroom International Sound Art Competition, London; SoundCamp Festival, London; Ausland, Berlin; Le Cube, Paris; Musée Guimet, Paris; Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Museum of Contemporary Art ARTBAR, Sydney; Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong's Sound Forms Festival, HK; Ftarri, Tokyo; the NOW Now Festival, Sydney; Firstdraft Gallery, and Casula Powerhouse, Sydney; Metro Arts gallery, Brisbane; and Siteworks Festival, Bundanon (w. the Splinter Orchestra).

In 2016 Alex graduated from the Master of Fine Arts interdisciplinary arts program at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, and participated on a field recording residency with Francisco Lopez in South Africa. In 2017 she was awarded the Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship for Emerging Artists, which led her to Europe and the UK to perform, and to study with David Toop and Chris Watson & Jez riley French in 2018. In 2018, she was selected as one the emerging artists for the SITUATE Art in Festivals Lab. In 2019, she resided at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, as one of the Asialink Arts Creative Exchange recipients. And her debut album Waking, She Heard The Fluttering, recently released on Room40, has received favourable reviews in The Wire Magazine and The Quietus.