(Sound Artist • Poet • Researcher of Linguistic Influence)
Aden Rhys is a sound artist and poet whose work investigates how language functions as a system of cultural conditioning. Through the lens of symbolic relativity — the idea that symbols, words, and linguistic structures shape our perception of reality — Rhys examines how everyday phrases quietly instruct us, confine us, and define our place in the social order.
Working with spoken text, fragmented poetry, generative sound, and spatial audio, Rhys transforms familiar language into immersive sonic environments that reveal its invisible authority. Their work exposes how phrases we take for granted become behavioural scripts: inherited rules, subtle controls, and cultural expectations absorbed long before we are conscious of them.
Rhys’ practice is equally poetic and analytical. They approach language as both an emotional material and an ideological system — something capable of tenderness, but also compliance. By distorting, looping, erasing, or splintering phrases, Rhys unravels the symbolic frameworks that shape identity and behaviour.
Their installations function as laboratories for listening: places where meaning dissolves, recombines, and confronts the listener with the realisation that words do not simply describe our world — they create it.
Aden Rhys 