Current work focuses on Shared Air: Maternal Breath;
an unfolding practice spanning film, embodied workshops, and live performance. Rooted in Irish Catholic maternal inheritance, the project explores breath as method and memory, tracing transformation across lived, institutional, and pilgrimage sites.
Marie Theresa Crick is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and facilitator whose work engages with transnational feminisms, embodied methodologies, and breath as ‘performance.’
She is a PhD researcher in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, a fellow of the Advanced Practices PhD, and an active member of collectives including Counterfield, Feminist Breath Collective and Radical Reliance Collective.
Born in Croydon to an Irish mother and a British father, her practice is rooted in the lived experience of Irish migration. This informs her exploration of Irish Catholic maternal shame, migration, and memory through philosophy, film, performance, and embodied workshops—reimagining maternal relations as sites of transformation.
Philosophically grounded in Luce Irigaray’s concept of shared air, Marie Theresa’s research examines breath as a medium for relational exchange. Her work explores how transgenerational shame is transmitted through the maternal relation and held in the body—drawing from lived experience of her mother’s dementia, shaped by migration and Irish Catholicism in London. Contextualised within colonial histories and state control over female bodies, her practice responds to what Sara Ahmed calls histories that hurt, attending to their affective and embodied residues.
Marie Theresa’s embodied practice explores breath as a relational and transformative medium across “private,” “public,” “filmic,” and “communal” air. Her practice includes intimate shared readings with her mother, public scripted performances at sites of the Virgin Mary, filmic works shaped by breath, and durational embodied workshops. These interwoven elements form an iterative methodology that includes:
Filmic breath: editing rhythmically to breath, where inhale and exhale structure cuts and pacing;
Embodied workshops: participatory, durational spaces where movement, breath, and collective inquiry support engagement with difficult affects;
Listening and reading groups: breath-led, text-based gatherings that approach feminist, ecological, and archival texts somatically;
Live performances: public, site-responsive actions, staged in pilgrimage spaces or institutional settings.
Through these practices, breath becomes a way of listening—of staying with grief, shame, and what resists resolution. Her embodied circular readings are central to this: performative acts that “put in play” personal and inherited experiences of maternal shame, dementia, and migration within “brave spaces” shaped by feminist ethics of care and co-presence. Inspired by Irish contemporary practices (such as those of Jesse Jones and Sarah Browne), these workshops and performances invite participants to engage without judgment—fostering collective reflection, vulnerability, and co-regulation.
Marie Theresa also works in close dialogue with transnational collaborators whose practices entangle somatic, ecofeminist, and relational concerns. These include textile artist Di Fabrizio, musician-artist Streklas, and artist, ecologist, and healer Clews, among others.
Her interdisciplinary methodology bridges historical, philosophical, and creative approaches. She engages deeply with archives in Ireland and England—including the National Library of Ireland, the Radharc Film Archive, the Irish Film Institute, and the Irish Archive at London Metropolitan University—attending to silences and omissions. Her archival and practice-based research seeks to create dialogues between academic and artistic practices, reframing the colonial entanglements of Ireland and England and tracing their psychosocial impact.
Marie Theresa’s facilitation experience spans over 20 years, working with learners from early childhood (ages 3–5) through to postgraduate levels. She specialises in photography, film, fine art, philosophy, and contemporary art theory, and teaches as a Visiting Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. Her teaching includes undergraduate and postgraduate modules such as Feminist and Queer Technoscience, Ocean as Archive, Histories of Art LAB, and Situated Knowledges. Her approach to teaching and facilitation centres relationality, experimental pedagogy, and the creation of inclusive, multi-directional learning environments.
Across her work, breath is positioned as a relational and transformative force; a way of staying with the maternal, with grief, and with histories that hurt. Through embodied, filmic, and collective practices, she opens space to imagine new forms of co-becoming, and to dwell within the silences of the past without erasure.
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