Max Eastley
Max Eastley has been working with sound and sculpture since 1971, investigating the relationships between nature, chance, music and art. He has exhibited kinetic sculptures all over the world, from Ireland to Latvia, from Mexico to Japan, some operated by electrical power and some by the forces of the weather. Like Jonathan Leverkuhn in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus “…what occupies him is the essential unity of animate and so-called inanimate nature, it is the thought that we sin against the latter when we draw too hard and fast a line between the two fields, since in reality it is pervious and there is no elementary capacity which is reserved entirely to the living creature and which the biologist can not also study on an inanimate subject”.
Max Eastley is well known as a musician and composer, having played and recorded with musical luminaries such as Brian Eno, David Toop, Evan Parker, Thomas Koner and having recently composed for the Siobhan Davies Dance Company. He is also involved in the Cape Farewell project (www.capefarewell.com), in which scientists and artists raise awareness of the effects of global warming on the Arctic environment. He made three visits to Spitsbergen between 2003 and 2005 and has produced kinetic sculptures and music inspired by those visits which have been seen in 2005 and 2006 at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the Natural History Museum London and in the Liverpool Biennale.