Colin Woods

Artist’s Statement

I am an artist who works primarily with sound, performance, and installations that generate sound, sometimes with accompanying video.

The sounds I use include collected and found sounds, improvised segments, and conventionally composed material. The installations often involve reused and salvaged materials.

My practice explores how participation and improvisation lead to openness in artistic works and compel the re-examination of the relationships among artefacts, observers and creators. It can cause us to consider the boundaries between “art” and our mundane lives. Those boundaries are exposed as osmotic and dynamic rather than impermeable and immutable, with no absolute origins on any sliding scale.

Thus, the locus of any artwork is in the process of our experiencing of its trace and our interpretation of that trace within the constraints of our own particular context.  It is how we feel about what we believe about the artefact. Feeling that experience is where the embodied knowledge resides.

Biography

Colin James Woods is an Irish-born freelance artist and sonic practitioner based in Belfast (N. Ireland). Colin was born in Belfast (Northern Ireland) and moved to Aotearoa/New Zealand in 2002. He was previously guitarist with Irish punk band Music for the Deaf, and a participant in UK/Ireland-based Allotropes experimental collective.

After spending 30 years working as a scientist in pathology laboratories, Colin returned to study, earning a Diploma in Contemporary Music (from Unitec, Auckland), a BMus (Hons) in Composition from the University of Auckland, and a master’s degree in creative technology from AUT (Auckland).

 He returned to Belfast in 2023 and is currently working on his PhD project at Ulster University, where his research uses his practice to examine the notion of the artist as co-creator and how this erodes boundaries, transforms roles, and resists commodification.

Colin is a SOUNZ-represented composer and a Fellow of the Institute of Biomedical Science.