Filmic Bodies:
Shared Air: Embodied Fragments
Experimental film, sonic breath, maternal memory, and living archives
Still from Salt Breath - Not Yet the Sea (2025 onwards)
In Brief:
Filmic Bodies is an evolving constellation of experimental film and sound works shaped by breath, memory, site, maternal relation, chronic illness, and transnational feminist practice.
These works do not function as standalone films in a conventional sense. They are fragments, traces, rhythms, and atmospheres. They are often shown within embodied workshops, listening and reading groups, installations, performances, and shared spaces where bodily breath and filmic breath meet.
At the heart of this practice is filmic breath: a method of editing in which inhale, exhale, pause, hesitation, and bodily rhythm guide the cut. Breath shapes pacing, duration, image, sound, and relation.
The films ask:
How does a film breathe?
How can breath carry memory?
How do images hold silence?
How might film become a body among other bodies?
Across these works, breath becomes a site of rupture and relation. The films invite new ways of sensing, listening, surviving, and being-with. They emerge through place, weather, water, illness, performance, and the bodies they are shared with.
Still from Poetics of Filmic Breath: Iteration III – Sorrowful
Still from Salt Breath – Not Yet the Sea
On this page:
Key Works in the Constellation
What is Filmic Breath?
Filmic Bodies as Living Archive
Fragmentation as Form
How the Films Are Encountered
Current and Ongoing Work
Poetics of Filmic Breath
Collaborations
Shared Air: Maternal Echos 2025
Key Works in the Constellation
This page gathers recent iterations from the following evolving series:
Poetics of Filmic Breath: Maternal Air
Hydro Feminine
Salt Breath - Not Yet the Sea
Feminine-to-Come
Bodies of Water
Embodied Circular Reading
21 Scores for Losing Yourself in a Body
Each work is distinct, but they are connected by breath, fragmentation, shared air, and embodied encounter. Together, they form a living constellation of filmic and sonic bodies.
Click on each image below to explore more about the individual film series.
Methodology:
What is Filmic Breath?
Filmic breath is a way of editing, listening, and composing with breath.
Rather than cutting only for narrative continuity or visual logic, I edit through bodily rhythm: inhale, pause, exhale, hesitation, interruption, return. The cut follows the breath. The image responds to the body. The film begins to breathe.
The edit becomes:
an inhalation,
a pause,
an exhale,
a return.
This is what I call filmic breath.
Some breaths are my own. Some come from intimate performances. Some are shaped by the air of a site: wind, water, weather, footsteps, silence, or the room in which the work is later shown.
Filmic breath is not only a technique. It is a way of listening to what cannot be fully spoken. It allows film to hold memory without explaining it, and to carry affect without fixing it into narrative.
An in progress fragment from Salt Breath - Not Yet the Sea (2025)
Filmic Bodies as Living Archive
The filmic bodies form a living archive of breath, gesture, place, and relation.
They gather fragments from private spaces, public sites, pilgrimage routes, coastlines, windows, workshops, conversations, and bodies of water. These fragments do not attempt to create a complete record. Instead, they hold partial traces: a hand, a horizon, a breath, a shadow, a surface, a room, a shoreline, a gesture repeated.
The archive here is not static. It shifts each time the films are activated. A fragment shown in a workshop changes through the breath of those present. A film projected in a room becomes part of that room’s atmosphere. A sound work carries breath elsewhere, across distance and delay.
In this sense, the films are not documents of past performances. They are ongoing bodies of relation.
Fragmentation as Form
Fragmentation is central to this practice.
The films are not always screened as single linear works. They appear in fragments, intervals, loops, projections, layers, or as part of workshops and installations. They may be projected onto walls, held on screens, encountered through sound, or placed beside texts, letters, scores, and archival materials.
Fragmentation is not a lack. It is a method.
It reflects how memory arrives: partially, bodily, through interruption, repetition, sensation, and return. It also resists the pressure to make inherited histories fully visible, legible, or resolved.
The fragment allows space for what remains withheld. It creates room for opacity, ambiguity, and encounter.
How the Films Are Encountered
These works are made to be encountered collectively.
They are activated through:
embodied workshops
listening and reading groups
installation environments
site-responsive performances
sound works
shared study
archival displays
breath-led screenings
Participants may encounter the films through movement, stillness, reading, sound, silence, or breath-based prompts. The films are not background material. They are part of the room. They shape the atmosphere and are shaped by those present.
A film fragment changes when it is watched with others.
A breath sounds different in shared air.
A projected image becomes relational when bodies gather around it.
Key Works in the Constellation: In Focus
Title: Poetics of Filmic Breath: Maternal Air
Year: 2023 to ongoing
Medium: Multi channel experimental film series; cut on inhale/exhale; (shot and exhibited in 4K); embodied workshop iterations; performance installation
Duration: 2 to 25 minutes (presented in fragments, never in full)
Description:
Rooted in intimate performances with my mother, this film explores the maternal relation through shared breath, silence, and repetition. Together, we read a letter from my late aunt; not to be heard, but to breathe together. The words dissolve. What remains is rhythm, pause, breath.
This work unfolds between ‘private air’ and ‘public air’ - filmed across Marian sites and over the dining table in Croydon. Drawing from Luce Irigaray’s concept of “shared air,” the film asks: how can breath hold what language cannot? How might the maternal relation be transformative?
When projected in ‘communal air,’ during embodied workshops, the film breathes again. It moves differently each time, shaped by the bodies present, the shared temporality of the room, and the fragile but powerful space between participant and screen.
***
Title: Hydro Feminine
Year: 2022 to ongoing
Medium: Multi channel film series; cut on inhale/exhale; (shot and exhibited in 4K); embodied workshop iterations; site specific installation
Duration: Varies by fragment (5 to 20 minutes typical)
A meditation on the feminine-to-come, this film moves through the poetics of filmic breath and the modality of Ocean as Archive. It seeks to trace a hydro-feminine; a fluid, submerged form of feminine subjectivity that resists containment and speaks through water, breath, and voice.
Drawing on Irigaray’s Marine Lover and submerged rhythms of selected feminist fictions, this work moves through submerged breath, polyphonic voice, “shared air” and elemental intimacy, mirroring the ocean’s refusal to be contained.
***
Title: Salt Breath – Not Yet the Sea
Year: 2025 to ongoing
Medium: Multi channel film series; cut on inhale/exhale; (shot and exhibited in 4K); embodied workshop iterations; site specific installation
Duration: 30 secs to 10 minutes (presented in fragments)
A film emerging from a body caught in suspension. Salt Breath – Not Yet the Sea is made through the body ecology of illness, longing for Irish waters and other oceans.
A longing stirred: to see a sea I could reach, to touch, to feel movement while my body remained still. I let this desire lead; first to Brighton, then Hastings, Margate, Dungeness. Searching not for escape, but for a room with a sea view. The coast became a collaborator. I began walking slowly along its edges, letting breath and film co-emerge.
It began from being inside, desiring to be in the world. Film became a way of reworlding. I film mainly through windows of rooms I find myself in, watching shadows dance, sensing with breath.
***
Title: Feminine‑to‑Come
Year: 2022 to ongoing
Medium: Multi channel film series; cut on inhale/exhale; (shot and exhibited in 4K); embodied workshop iterations; site specific installation
Duration: 4 to 20 minutes (presented in fragments)
A layered filmic soundwork composed of recitations, archival voices, and submerged breaths recorded in London and Ireland. This work listens for a transformative feminine; flickering at the edges of memory, diaspora, and maternal inheritance. Some breaths surface clearly, others remain beneath.
***
Title: Bodies of Water
Year: 2022 to ongoing
Medium: Single channel film; used in listening and reading groups; embodied workshop screenings
Duration: 6 minutes 53 seconds (screened in full)
Emerging from dialogue with workshop participants, this piece begins by asking: what bodies of water stay with you? What follows is a collective inquiry into memory, affect, migration, and elemental attunement; offered as embodied responses to the affective weight of water and its multiple temporalities.
***
Title: 21 Scores for Losing Yourself in a Body
Year: 2024
Medium: Single channel film by Michele Saint-Michel; collaborative performance; 16mm film hand processed with digital video; colour; sound; single channel
Note: I appear as a performer and collaborator in this work, which was screened at Goldsmiths in 2025.
A film made as part of Michèle Saint-Michel’s 21 Scores project; a transnational somatic series connecting 34 artists through shared breath and bodily attunement. Here, Marie Theresa Crick performs a guided full-body scan, following Saint-Michel’s score: searching for tension, softening each part, breath growing shallow, presence deepening.
Embodied Workshop at Tsarino, Artist Residency in Bulgaria
This practice fosters multi-positional encounters rooted in lived experience and collective breath. In a time of breathlessness—ecological, political, and affective—these works ask: how do we breathe together across unequal and inherited conditions?
Current & Ongoing Work
Poetics of Filmic Breath: Maternal Air (2023 - onwards)
My current practice is anchored in five site-specific spaces:
Rosary Way, Dublin,
Lourdes, France
Fatima, Portugal
Lough Derg, Ireland
A dining room table, Croydon
These four pilgrimage sites and one intimate lived space, form the constellation through which I explore breath, ritual, and maternal relation. The performances at the dining table in Croydon are rooted in the everyday intimacy of care, Irish diaspora in London, and dementia, and are where the practice began. My mother and I return again and again to reading aloud a letter from my late aunt. But it is not the words that remain—it is our breath. These shared breaths, pauses, and silences form the structuring rhythm of all the filmic bodies. They are the pulse that moves the work.
From this atmosphere of ‘private air,’ the practice begins to expand outward into what I call ‘public air’. This term signals the entangled legacies of visibility and secrecy, especially within Irish Catholic maternal histories such as the mother and baby homes. At each Marian site, I perform the same gesture but this time alone; reading my aunt’s letter aloud, and this time into the open air.
This trajectory was initiated by a quiet gesture: my mother handing me a rosary that had once belonged to my grandmother, brought back from Lourdes. I could not explain why, but I felt a call to follow it; to stand where my grandmother once had, to stay with what lingers in my body that does not originate with me.
These acts are not intended to condemn or affirm faith, but to experiment with a shift from witnessing familial histories to embodying them. They are a way of staying with histories that hurt, attuned to a particular moment in time and its lingering effects. This is a movement toward inhabiting inherited residues, toward understanding how to remain in dialogue not only with my mother, but also with the spectral presence of my grandmother. Through filmic breath, I attempt to navigate and rebody these intergenerational transmissions — making space for their affective weight while also sensing toward what might emerge beyond them.
Lourdes 2025
In embodied workshops, the fragments from each site are projected in relation—to one another, to the room, to those present. Sometimes they play sequentially, other times simultaneously, across walls and thresholds. This structure creates not a fixed narrative but a breathing, dynamic filmic body that responds to the collective energy of each encounter. Each workshop becomes an iteration of the practice; unique, contingent, and co-composed.
I often layer water footage, filmed at these sites, and also in London and Ireland, with the images from the Marian sites. Rather than cutting to clarify, I use match-on-action edits to carry breath across shots. The result is not simply a film, but a filmic body—responsive, unresolved, breathing.
The water too is ‘affected’ by our shared breaths, as we are affected by the water that pulses through the filmic fragments.
Bodily Breath
Filmic Breath
Collide
Shared Air: Maternal Echos
Embodied Circular Reading 2025
Poetics of Filmic Breath (Ongoing Series, 2023–2025)
Poetics of Filmic Breath: Iteration I – Joyfulness
Poetics of Filmic Breath
The films below are part of an ongoing process that informs these core filmic bodies.
A dual filmic meditation on breath, ritual, and memory across convent spaces
Rome and Venice
Filmed upon repeated returns to Venice over many years, this work explores the sorrowful mystery of the rosary and the depths of the Irish Catholic maternal through filmic breath. In a convent by the canal, I capture 15-second fragments of my repeated reading of my aunt’s letter, intertwining personal and collective memory. The film serves as a meditative practice of embodied presence in spaces like convents, reflecting on the historical weight of convent life and its contemporary manifestations. Here, filmic breath becomes a witness to maternal vulnerability and resilience, inviting viewers to contemplate the enduring legacy of transgenerational affect as I navigate my breath and its entanglements with Ireland and London.
Participatory Atmospheres
These works foster multi-positional encounters rooted in lived experience, collective breath, and ethical attention.
In a time of breathlessness — ecological, political, medical, and affective — the filmic bodies ask:
How do we breathe together across unequal and inherited conditions?
How do we listen to what has been withheld?
How can film hold relation without making everything visible?
How might a fragment become a way of staying with what remains unresolved?
Closing Line
The film does not simply show breath. It breathes with the bodies that gather around it.