IRIS VOSS





Artist working with sound, image, and place.

My practice explores listening as a way of understanding landscape. Through sound, text, and image I work with ecology, time, and memory.


irisvosshere@gmail.com

Substack

WORKS




2025
Silent Spring

A site-specific sound installation developed at Maajaam / Wild Bits residency in Estonia. Hand-cranked transmitters broadcast recordings of the forest through birdbox radios, creating a network of fragile signals. The piece reflects on ecological loss and the disappearance of patient listening in an age of urgency and noise.

silentspring.fm


2024 Field Cards (Wish You Could Hear)

An ongoing series of fragmentary works combining field recording, poetic text, and image. Each sonogram preserves a moment in time and space — a bell at midnight, rain on a wooden hut, the tremor of insects inside timber — stamped and mailed as a postcard from a place the viewer may never visit. The project explores listening as a form of correspondence across distance.


2024The Grain of Place

A series of works using printmaking techniques to capture sound through contact with the environment. Surfaces drawn directly from the landscape — stone, timber, plant matter, mineral fragments — act as carriers for lithographic transfers. Movements in the environment and vibrations from recordings are absorbed into these materials, binding acoustic traces to the substance of place itself. Each piece functions as both trace and transformation: a fragment of landscape marked by sound.



2022
No Fixed Place

A moving-image work set in Kraków’s Kazimierz district and the site of the former Jewish Ghetto. Contact microphones and geophones are pressed against walls, pipes, and foundations, uncovering vibrations normally beyond hearing. The camera lingers on fragile, overlooked architecture while the soundtrack carries the city’s buried acoustic body. In a landscape once marked by absence and ruin, now redeveloped and commodified, memory persists as resonance: faint, displaced, and trembling beneath the surface of urban renewal.



2021
Even If You Won’t Grow, I Will

A moving-image and sound work tracing the fragile yet insistent growth of plants in the cracks and margins of the city. Through field recordings and close video observation, the project attends to weeds pushing through concrete, vines climbing derelict façades, and wildflowers reclaiming forgotten corners. The work frames these small eruptions of life as acts of persistence within a built environment that resists them. Both document and metaphor, the piece reflects on resilience, adaptation, and the quiet force of non-human survival in urban space.








                








Last Updated 24.10.31
CURRENT WORK








Marchenbrunnen, Volkspark Friedrichshain, Berlin, Germany
4 September 2025

(posted from the Museum of Communication, Berlin, the world's oldest postal museum.)



The closer I come to the edge
the farther slips away
the world behind my back. 

Sleeping Beauty whispers
Little Riding Hood whispers
and the ravens, bound in stone, 
whisper too. 

Do not leave just yet. 

September morning 
Shimmering gold
in the fountain
of fairytales. 

/
 



Church Bell, Aulus-les-Bains, Pyrenees, France
23-24 August 2025

(posted from Aulus-les Bains Post Office)
Midnight roof
the bell folds time
into the valley. 

Silence leans closer
holding me as the
stars do. 



  



Old Mountain Hut, Aulus-les-Bains, Pyrenees, France
21 August 2025


(posted from Aulus-les Bains Post Office)



Inside the hut
rain rings on the roof
A beam of old wood
filled with tiny mouths. 

A hollow pulse. 
I listen. 

The forest eats the house
from inside out. 







Thunderstorm, southern Poland
July 2025



A pause in the rain
Thunder rolls in the valley’s dark

Somewhere far off, a dog barks. 

Above me, 
the trembling sky.







Field Notes - Pyrenees
August 2025
Tracing nature in the Pyrenees. 

Exploring how textures, growth patterns, and hidden vibrations shape both the forest and our perception of it.

 



Field Notes - Pyrenees
August 2025
Field Recording - Old Silver Mine

At the abandoned Mines des Argentières near Aulus-les-Bains, I worked with the Geofon on a foggy, rain-soaked day. The sound of water striking rusted metal and rock carried through the sensor — vibrations both fragile and heavy. 

The Mines des Argentières once drew people here for lead and silver, the mountainside cut through with shafts. Over the centuries the activity slowed, the workings collapsed, and the structures rusted back into the landscape. What remains now is a quiet terrain of stone, metal and water — traces of industry blurred by weather and time.




Field Notes - Estonia
June 2025 In July the Silent Spring installation will be presented to the public as part of the summer exhibition at Maajaam in Estonia. The work, developed during the Wild Bits residency, was supported by the European Capitals of Culture program and facilitated by Maajaam.

Silent Spring is a network of hand-cranked radios housed in wooden bird boxes and installed throughout the forest. When activated by visitors, the devices transmit sound fragments — recordings, static, and environmental signals — which intermingle with the natural soundscape of the site. 

The installation invites a slower mode of listening, foregrounding the relationship between technology, ecology, and human presence in the landscape.

Further info: silentspring.fm

Ein Lied für Staatsminister von Stephan, gewidmet vom Verfasser — Ernst Erich Hermann Oeynhausen, 1896. Museum of Communication,  Berlin.



Wish You Could Hear: Field Cards


Project statement

Wish You Could Hear is an ongoing project that translates soundscapes into postcards. Each field card is produced entirely on site:

  • I make a field recording at the location.
  • I generate a sonogram from that recording.
  • I print the postcard on location.
  • I write a short poem on the reverse.
  • I mail it directly from the site.

The result is a mailed fragment of listening — a place rendered visually, temporally, and textually, but never audibly. There is no QR code, no audio file. The recipient receives only the translation and must imagine the sound.


Concept

The project explores the relationship between auditory and visual experiences of place. What is a place? A terrain, a memory, an imagination, a sonic event? The postcard format — traditionally used for “wish you were here” — becomes instead “wish you could hear.” Each field card functions as both a trace and a proof: a moment captured, mailed, and preserved in transit.

I am particularly drawn to locations of ecological fragility and decline: sites where sonic qualities are shifting or disappearing. In these contexts, the postcards act as temporal markers — documenting a landscape through listening before it changes irreversibly.


Context

The project is situated within traditions of acoustic ecology, sound art, and field recording, but also within the cultural history of the postcard as a democratic, tactile medium of exchange.


Why now

We live in a moment saturated by digital media, where sound is often consumed instantly and then lost. By contrast, these postcards slow down the encounter. They arrive in the hand days or weeks later, carrying the aura of both place and time, inviting the recipient into an act of imaginative listening.







© irisvoss.co.uk 2025