about
Jonathan Crean is a sound artist and performer based in Ballina, Co. Mayo. He works with natural materials, improvisation, and field recording to create performances and installations that draw attention to listening as an ecological act and sound-making as a field of mutual becoming.
Using branches, leaves, stones, shells, and hand-built wooden instruments in conjunction with contact mics, hydrophones, motors and transducers, he develops environments where sound emerges through touch, vibration, and responsive listening. Improvisation is central to his practice.
Recent works include the trees have something to say, an ongoing live performance series that utilises contact-miked wood and inductive soundscapes; cycle form, an activated sculpture using water, contact mics and maxMSP; and so they reach back, a film and sound piece exploring embodied encounters with landscape.
Crean holds an MA in Experimental Sound Practice from University College Cork. He is a member of The Fold, a cross-disciplinary group of artists and geologists, and the NCF Artist Collective in Mayo. He is also a founding member of Celtic Reflections, an experimental radio art collective. Crean has exhibited nationally and internationally, taking part in multiple group and solo shows.
image by erin plaice
Statement (2025)
I make work out of common ground—a field of mutual becoming.
My practice is guided by a desire for deeper nature-connectedness. It rarely begins with sound; it begins with listening. Listening at every stage. And between.
I view my workings as spaces where listening is an ecological act. Through listening and improvising common ground is revealed, and a way of moving inside the work:
co-presence rather than authorship,
following rather than controlling,
behaving rather than performing,
being moved as well as moving.
The act of listening has led me to consider the natural materials I engage with—branches, stones, water, moss—not as tools, but as portals into behaviour states—ways of being that ripple through sound.
My goal is to create a space where the human and the more-than-human coalesce—where sound is not produced but arises through relation. A space where:
gestures carry histories
materials hold agency
sound behaves
the body remains porous
and the performance is never yours alone.
