Martin Eccles

I am a walking sound artist and poet who lives in Newcastle upon Tyne in the north-east of England. My practice aims to reflect the experience of my presence in and walking through natural environments.
I uses a range of methods (predominantly sound and text) to respond to time, distance and place in the landscape. My sound works explore time through a number of methods such as replicated walks, durational walks, “Cagean” walks and walks that challenge my senses. In replicated walks I records walks of the same route repeatedly over a defined time period – for example, walking the same route every three hours for 24 hours, to present a day or the same route once a month for 12 months to present a year. In durational walks I concatenate recordings of individual walks within a site and presents them within an extended site recording. I use “Cagean” methods to randomly generate sites and durations to record in order to reflect Cage’s assertion that all sounds are of equal interest. Challenging my senses involves walking in unusual locations – inside a lead mine; in a river – where my senses – vision, touch, hearing – cannot function as normal; this leads to a contemplation of the act of walking and movement and how landscape shapes this. The recordings from each of these methods are usually presented in multi-channel sound installations but each is also used to provide the material for a variety of radio shows. My poetry is concise and usually in the Japanese poetic forms of haiku or haibun, attempting to capture an essence of each particular walk. The poems are presented as text but are also spoken and presented within the sound recordings.
I qualified in Fine Art from Newcastle University in 2016 and am currently studying part-time for a PhD in Fine Art. I have exhibited in group shows at: Watchtower Gallery Berwick upon Tweed (2014); XL Gallery Newcastle University (2015); Culture Lab, Newcastle University (2016, 2017) and to a group radio broadcast in 2017. I have had solo shows/works at: The North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers, Newcastle upon Tyne (2015); Fine Art Department, Newcastle University, Watchtower Gallery Berwick upon Tweed (2016); Culture Lab, Newcastle University (2017), ‘Sound+Environment’, Hull, (2017) and Steklenik, Ljubljana (2019). I have had solo radio broadcasts in 2018, 2019 and 2020 and, in 2018/19 had a 24-episode radio series and the broadcast of a continuous 24-hour work.
I have published work in Alliterati magazine and presented work in ‘Desire Lines, Dawdles and Drifts: Walking together as research’, Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference, Cardiff, 2018 and at the 4thWorld Congress of Psychogeography, Huddersfield, 2018.