Hector MacInnes

Biography

Hector MacInnes is a sound artist and researcher with a socially-engaged and community-facing practice. His current work and research emerge from the experience of having grown up in the West Highlands of Scotland, a historical and contemporary site of urgent contestation between the will of local communities and the supervening imaginaries of touristic, capitalist, landlordist and digital extractivism.

Often making collaboratively with other artists and communties, his past projects have included:

Angle of Rest (2025), a 3 mo. residency at Skaftfell (Seyðisfjörður, Iceland) with printmaker Philippa C Thomas, interrogating the place of young children within the artistic residency infrastructure;
This Fantasy Must End! (2025) a curated programme of moving image, audio and workshop for Lux Scotland, with Aqsa Arif;
Toll (2024), an artist-led radical archive of covid experiences, created as a pandemic memorial for the Highlands with Sinead Hargan, Cat Meighan, David Snoo Wilson, Daniel Freyne and Mike Webster;
Pfft Ensemble (2023), a sonic-fictional improvisers ensemble led by prisoners at HMP Inverness;
Arburo (2017), a world-building experiment with Philippa C Thomas using verbatim accounts of eviction victims past and present;
The Hebridean Cable Transit Company (2016), a diptych of exhibitions created with Philippa C Thomas that propose an alternative postwar history for the Outer Hebrides;
The Replica Hearth (2014), a meticulous recreation of the living room of a local apparition, Eoghann the Yeti, in a 20ft shipping container, created with Kate McMorrine.

As a producer and technician, he has worked with a range of artists with connections to, or making work in, the west Highlands, including Ros T, Daimh, Fras, Niteworks, Mairearad Green, Walker and Bromwich, David Littler, Jason Singh, Caroline Bergvall. More recently he has worked with experts from experience, academics and lawmakers to create advocacy and knowledge-exchange content for the social policy research project Changing Realities (Universities of York and Salford).

Hector is a member of the folk-noir, storytelling and improvisation quartet The Dead Man's Waltz (2009-), and was previously the live percussionist for electronica producer Mylo (2005-7).

Hector has taught sound, music and sonic technologies across a wide range of socially engaged projects and at HE level with LCC's BA Sound Arts and UHI's BA Gaelic and Traditional Music.