Hello. I'm Hector MacInnes, I work in socially engaged art, sound and research. I create through spoken
word, sonic fiction, installation, text, tech, music, radio, speculative
design and organising things, often in collaboration with other
artists and a diverse range of communities. Having been born and grown up on the Isle of Skye, my projects are deeply rooted in an ongoing interrogation of belonging, identity, legitimacy and lived experience of the more-than-urban, and I now work with these as central themes across the country.
I am also working towards a PhD at CRiSAP
(Creative Research Into Sound Arts Practice) at UAL, where I
am undertaking practice-based research around the concept of
the field, anthropocene rurality, and the New Weird.
With Cat Meighan, Sinéad Hargan, David Snoo Wilson, Daniel Freyne and Mike Webster.
A radical archive of miniature statements, stories, wishes, memories, exclamations and demands from Highlanders impacted by the coronavirus pandemic and its legacies since 2020. Over the course of the year, this archive will be drawn from contributing communities and individuals, and each short contribution will be inscribed onto a hand-bell, to be rung each time it is needed – collectively and apart, now and in the future.
2024 - [we have questions #2]
With Cat Meighan. We Have Questions is a two day, artist-led working group exploring contemporary rurality. Cat and I devised the first event as the summation of our residencies with the Highland Culture Collective. It brought together 18 practitioners from across Scotland to discuss themes including risk aversion, queerness, climate anxiety and tensions between communities of place and of practice.
WHQ2 will take place in September 2024, and opens for application very soon.
2024 - [voice over]
A research and reflection project funded by Creative Scotland, exploring the way the voice is deployed, recorded and inflected across different media in the course of socially engaged arts work. A journal of the project and its outcomes will be available later in 2024.
2024 - [artists' moving image festival]
Artist and filmmaker Aqsa Arif and I are co-programming an iteration of LUX's Artists' Moving Image Festival in early 2025, with Atlas Arts.
With Sinéad Hargan. An ephemeral choir, based in The
Bare Project's "People's Palace of Possibility", which
materialised in Lyth, Caithness during July and August
2023. Across three short rehearsals, choir members used
their voices to explore the way they respond to
instruction, authority and belonging in the context of
utopian fantasies.
Quadraphonic sound work as part of an audiovisual
installation which tells a story of architecture, situatedness, landscape and language in the West Highlands and Islands.
Part of Dangerous Liaisons at La Biennale Architettura in
Venice. Created with film-maker Peter Marsden and writer
Cal Flyn.
Devised and curated with Cat Meighan. We Have Questions was a two day
practice-as-research gathering of 18 artists, exploring issues around
socially engaged practice in contemporary rural settings, such as
risk aversion, queerness, climate anxiety and tensions
between communities of place and of practice. Copies
of the zine of our findings is available on request. WHQ2 will be taking place later in 2024, please get in touch for details on how and when to apply.
Part of my residency with the Highland Culture Colective.
Artist led research and consultation into community
responses to the pandemic and its legacies in Highland
region. Together with Sinéad Hargan and Cat Meighan, we
led sessions focusing on sense-memories of the pandemic,
to work towards concepts for a memorial or other response
in the public art sphere.
A nebulous improvisers' ensemble using iPads, touchOSC
and MAX. Co-designed with inmates of HMP Inverness and
community groups, using a circular test-and-learn
approach.
Part of my work with the Highland Culture Colective.
You can read a conversation between myself and Arusa
Qureshi about my prison work [HERE],
and watch a panel discussion I took part in on the
amplification of minoritised voices [HERE]
Installation, Inverness Creative Academy, Nov 2022:
Highland Culture Collective artists Catriona Meighan and
Hector MacInnes present a series of workshops and talks,
share co-created work, and reflect on the meaning of their
socially engaged practice.
Ongoing work with social security researchers at the Universities of York, Birmingham and Salford, recording and
disseminating the lived experiences of parents and carers on low
incomes, first during the covid pandemic, and now during
the cost of living crisis.
A group exhibition of speculative souvenirs at An
Lanntair in Stornoway, built on the myth of the Bùth
MhicNeacail (Nicolson's Kiosk). The exhibition was
co-curated by Philippa C Thomas and myself and featured
artists & makers from across Scotland.
A response to the 1962 Pure Maths Exam, commissioned by
the National Library of Scotland for "Re-Sits",
celebrating the digitisation of their exam archive.
Created in collaboration with singers from across the Isle
of Skye, the piece is an exploration of the circular ruins
of Dùn Beag - a stone age broch - as a site of maths,
music and indeterminacy. Meeting within its walls over the
course of 6 weeks, we played with distribution of harmony,
chanting, binary counting and improvisation to see what
might emerge from the questions in the exam.
The imaginary history of the Hebridean Cable Transit
Company, retold in two exhibitions by Philippa C Thomas
and I. The first of these celebrated the company's 1950's
heyday and featured the complete restoration of gondola
#72 ("Effie"), the second explored the hubris and
submarine adventure that led to it's demise in the Sound
of Harris.
As adults we often make sweeping predictions ourselves
and our world, when the people who live in those futures
are already here among us, albeit in child form. The
Informants presents edited and anonymised interview
content which is, in a playful way, an attempt to get them
to “report back” on what those futures are like. This
project had two iterations, one for the In Cahoots
conference at Sound Festival Aberdeen, and one for Atlas
Arts' "Travelling The Archive".
2014 - [the replica hearth]
A collaborative project with Kate McMorrine, exploring
the story of 'Eoghann the Yeti', a crofter who
mysteriously vanished into woodland on the Isle of Skye in
1984. The work centres around a reconstruction of
Eoghann's living room inside a shipping container, and a
museum/gift shop housing an exhaustive collection of
speculative academia. The exhibition was a journey through
his personal life and the contemporary history of his
community, but beneath it were clues to something more
sublime and unharnessed.
2013 - [story's end]
Created with The Dead Man's Waltz, Story's End was a
collective performance exploring the role of death in
narrative. It involved film-maker Johnny Barrington,
visual artists Kate McMorrine, Cat Ingall and Mark
Weallans, and author/performer Hal Duncan. It was perormed
in different guises at the Glasgow Short Film Festival,
Death: A Festival For The Living at the Southbank Centre,
and as part of the Made In Scotland showcase at the
Edinburgh Fringe.
2013 - [spin cycle]
A multi-artist performance led by David Littler and
Jason Singh (Sampler/Cultureclash), with Anne Martin and
Deirdre Nelson, exploring circular movement through sound,
music, textiles and folk tales. Performed at Skye Bike
Fest and Cecil Sharpe House in Camden.
A piece of alternative chamber-trad, winner of the
inaugural Bennett Prize for Traditional Composition,
hosted at The Queen's Hall in Edinburgh in honour of the
seminal fiddler and producer Martyn Bennett. The excerpts
here are performed by Anna Massie, Mairearad Green, Rua
MacMillan, Iain Sandilands and Hamish Napier.
coming soon
email: hec dot macinnes at gmail dot com
tel: 07747148465
insta: @hectormacinnes
copyright 2021 Hector MacInnes, All Rights Reserved
header photo of Dualchas (La Biennale Architettura 2023) by Jordan
Young