Community Engagement
In Brief:
My community engagement practice is rooted in socially engaged art, embodied workshops, listening and reading groups, radical friendship, and living archival practice.
I create spaces where people can gather around texts, breath, memory, sound, film, correspondence, and shared attention. These spaces are not designed to produce quick outcomes or extract personal stories. Instead, they invite participants to arrive gently, listen, pause, read, breathe, reflect, and respond in ways that feel possible.
My work often engages difficult histories: Irish diasporic memory, maternal inheritance, migration, Catholicism, shame, institutional violence, silence, care, and the body. Through workshops, reading groups, and participatory installations, I ask how community can form around careful listening rather than disclosure; around relation rather than resolution.
Community engagement, for me, is not a separate strand of the practice. It is the practice: a way of making art through encounter, co-presence, trust, and shared responsibility.
Socially Engaged Artistic Practice
My socially engaged practice unfolds across artist residencies, universities, community spaces, online gatherings, exhibitions, and informal networks of artists, researchers, students, and collaborators.
These projects take different forms: breath-led workshops, embodied circular readings, collective listening sessions, radical friendship gatherings, sound works, correspondence archives, and living installations. What connects them is a commitment to creating conditions where participants can think and feel together without pressure to perform, confess, or agree.
The work often begins with simple gestures: arriving in the body, listening to breath, reading aloud, introducing ourselves through a body of water, sharing a fragment of text, or sitting together in silence. From these gestures, more complex conversations can emerge around history, inheritance, care, and relation.
Rather than approaching community engagement as outreach, I understand it as a reciprocal artistic method. Each gathering shapes the work. Each participant, site, text, and atmosphere alters what becomes possible.
Irish Diaspora and Community Histories
A central focus of my practice is the lived experience of Irish diaspora and communities connected to Irish maternal histories.
These histories are entangled with migration, Catholicism, class, secrecy, institutional violence, and cultural memory. They influence how shame, silence, care, and trauma are transmitted across generations, often through the body as much as through language.
My work approaches these histories carefully. I am not interested in forcing testimony or asking participants to disclose personal experience. Instead, I create spaces where memory can be approached through text, breath, film, sound, silence, gesture, and shared attention.
Working with Irish communities, diasporic communities, and transnational collaborators allows the practice to move beyond a single national frame. It asks how Irish histories of migration, gendered containment, religious control, and maternal memory resonate with other histories of displacement, silence, and inheritance.
Radical Friendship and Collective Listening
Radical friendship has become an important framework for my community engagement practice.
Through the Radical Friendship Listening and Reading Group, participants from different countries and disciplines gather online to read, listen, annotate, and think together. The group approaches friendship not as sameness or agreement, but as a practice of remaining in relation across difference, discomfort, opacity, and distance.
This method extends into workshops and public projects. It asks how we might gather in a polarised world without demanding consensus, certainty, or resolution. It also asks how care can be practised without collapsing complexity.
Radical friendship offers a way of building community through shared study: through listening, reading, correspondence, and the slow formation of trust.
Embodied Workshops and Listening Groups
My embodied workshops and listening and reading groups are durational practices that unfold across artist residencies, academic settings, community spaces, and online platforms.
They incorporate breath, guided reading, film fragments, sound, writing, movement, silence, and shared reflection. Participants are invited to engage in ways that feel possible: through voice, stillness, gesture, writing, listening, or withdrawal.
These gatherings are shaped as brave spaces grounded in feminist ethics of care, consent, opacity, and co-presence. They do not promise comfort, but they do create conditions for careful encounter.
By exploring breath as a relational medium, the workshops invite participants to reconnect with their bodies, memories, and surroundings. They offer reflective spaces for navigating complex familial, cultural, and historical narratives without requiring resolution.
Living Archives and Participatory Installations
Community engagement also enters my practice through living archives and participatory installations.
In these works, the archive is not a fixed repository but a process of gathering. Letters, handwritten fragments, citations, annotations, sound, film, breath scores, objects, workshop traces, and participant reflections accumulate over time.
At Tsarino Artist Residency in Bulgaria, listening and reading groups culminated in a communal exhibition where handwritten fragments were encased in glass and suspended in the mountain air. In current and developing projects, I continue to explore how studios, museums, and residency spaces can become living archives: spaces where community is formed through shared attention and return.
This approach directly informs my current work around Radical Friendship and future projects where the studio becomes an archive of listening, correspondence, and relation.
Dementia, Care, and Intergenerational Memory
My practice is also shaped by experiences of care, dementia, and intergenerational memory.
Rather than treating care as a private matter alone, I understand it as a relational, cultural, and political practice. Care changes time. It changes listening. It asks for patience, repetition, humour, grief, and attentiveness to what may not be spoken directly.
These experiences have influenced how I facilitate workshops and listening spaces. They have deepened my commitment to slower forms of participation, to repetition, to non-linear memory, and to modes of engagement that do not depend on verbal fluency or immediate response.
This strand of the work continues to inform my interest in dementia-aware, intergenerational, and care-focused community practice, particularly in Irish contexts.
Accessibility, Ethics, and Community Care
Living with endometriosis and navigating chronic pain has shaped my commitment to accessibility and ethical engagement.
Access is built into the structure of my workshops, not added afterwards. Check-ins, opt-outs, pauses, invitations to remain still, and the option to step away are part of how the work is held.
I recognise that bodies meet spaces differently. Participants may carry chronic illness, trauma, grief, neurodivergence, care responsibilities, anxiety, or simply the need to be quiet. My workshops make space for different modes of participation.
Ethically, I prioritise consent, transparency, and participant agency. Photos are only taken with explicit permission. Sessions are not recorded unless agreed in advance. Participants are never required to disclose personal experience.
Collaborative Impact and Broader Significance
These community-based practices enrich my artistic research while also creating spaces for public reflection, collective memory, and shared inquiry.
By engaging with artists, students, scholars, local communities, diasporic groups, and international collaborators, my work bridges academic inquiry with lived experience. It challenges conventional ideas of where knowledge is produced and who gets to participate in its formation.
The impact of the work is often quiet and relational. It may take the form of a conversation after a workshop, a participant returning to a text, a shared silence, a new collaboration, or a fragment carried into another context.
For me, community engagement is about creating conditions where something can be held together, even briefly: breath, memory, difficulty, uncertainty, and the possibility of relation.
Participant Reflections
On 'Walk with - Venice' Workshop
"During the 'Walk with - Venice' workshop with Marie Theresa, I experienced a city I know intimately in a new way—visually, emotionally, and intellectually. Collaborating in discussion with artists, architects, and commentators, I saw Venice from new angles and generated fresh thinking from the shared, challenging perspectives. Marie Theresa was an open and gently probing facilitator, holding us all in the spaces without directing—prompting but not pushing any one voice or direction."
— Workshop Participant
On Ongoing Discussions & Collaboration
"I've been taking part in discussions with Marie Theresa over a number of years, exchanging ideas and broadening our collective and individual thinking around a number of topics pertaining to our respective areas of practice. A curious and spacious thinking partner, I'm continuously impressed by how generous Marie Theresa is in sharing her thoughts, tools, and insights, and how receptive she is to feedback and alternate considerations."
— Collaborator & Discussion Partner
Participant Consent and Agency
In all embodied workshops, listening and reading groups, and participatory projects, I prioritise participant agency and ethical engagement.
Before each session, participants receive an address and consent form outlining the workshop’s purpose, structure, and possible emotional terrain. This ensures transparency and supports informed consent.
Participants are encouraged to engage at their own pace, pause when needed, remain silent, or step out at any time. The aim is to create a space where people can participate with care, autonomy, and choice.
For more details, you can view or download the forms here: