Hannah Kemp-Welch is a social practice sound artist. Her work explores collective art-making and analogue technologies as accessible and inclusive formats, with listening at the core of a relational practice.
Much of Hannah’s work is collaborative and community-based, situated across youth projects and workshops with community groups. Projects often involve collective sound-making, whether for established formats such as radio broadcast or within experimental music contexts. Her approach has developed through many years working in learning and engagement roles in arts organisations, including Tate, the National Gallery, London Metropolitan Archives, and youth music charity Raw Material.
Expanded radio forms a key part of her practice. Hannah is fascinated by radio as a natural phenomenon and experiments with DIY antennas to tune into electromagnetic waves resonating from the Earth and stars. This work was recently documented in the BBC Radio 4 feature All Under One Magnetosphere, co-produced with Oliver Sanders, which followed a field trip to the Arctic to capture electromagnetic energies associated with auroral displays. Hannah is broadly interested in the intersections of art and science and holds an amateur radio licence.
Connected to this work, Hannah is an active member of the feminist radio art group Shortwave Collective. Together they run DIY radio-building workshops and produce sound art performances, broadcasts and collective writing. Reflections on their methodologies for radio listening as a plural and situated practice are published in Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear (eds. Revell & Shin, 2024).
Alongside her radio practice, Hannah works with analogue film. She uses 8mm and Super8 cameras, alongside ecological film development processes, to document projects collectively, and also teaches 16mm filmmaking and film developing at Kingston School of Art. Hannah also produces audio documentaries and podcasts for a range of arts, community and activist organisations. A collaboratively produced podcast series on childcare activism for On The Record received the Silver Award in the Grassroots Podcasts category at the Audio UK Awards (2024).
Hannah is an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins and London College of Communication, where she teaches sound arts, cultural histories, community engagement and collaborative practice. She delivers the elective Cultural Democracy for BA Culture, Criticism and Curation and leads the Final Major Project unit for MA Sound Arts. She is currently undertaking an AHRC-funded PhD with Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) at London College of Communication. Her doctoral project, Listening With: Practices for Community-Based Art, explores how specific modes of listening can support community-based artistic practices.
