Filmic Bodies:
Shared Air: Embodied Fragments
Still from Salt Breath - Not Yet the Sea (2025 onwards)
In brief:
Relational Ecologies in Fragments, Breath, and Shared air
Filmic Bodies is an evolving constellation of experimental film works and embodied methodologies shaped by breath-led editing, chronic illness, transnational feminist philosophy, maternal relations, and transnational memory. The films do not function as standalone pieces, but instead form a rhythmic ecology—an archive of shared air, somatic gestures, and affective relations shaped by site, histories, and bodily ecologies. At the heart of this practice is filmic breath; a methodology in which breath guides editing, pacing, and relation. Influenced by Luce Irigaray’s concept of “shared air,” this approach foregrounds rhythm, absence, and co-presence over narrative closure. Across these works, breath becomes a site of both rupture and relation, inviting new ways of sensing, survival, and shared presence. They ask: how do we breathe together across unequal and inherited conditions? These filmic bodies emerge and evolve through embodied workshops, installations, and site-responsive processes. They are shaped by breath, by place, and by the bodies they move 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
Methodology: What is Filmic Breath?
Filmic Bodies Series
Fragmentation as Form
Participatory Atmospheres
Atmospheric Memory and Shared Air
Still from Salt Breath – Not Yet the Sea
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
Click on each image below to explore more about the individual film series.
Methodology:
What is Filmic Breath?
Filmic breath is not only a method of editing but a way of listening, sensing, and composing with breath as a guide. Cuts and pacing are determined not by logic or continuity, but by somatic rhythm, silence, and relational timing. Drawing from Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of “shared air” and transnational feminist ethics of care, the films are sculpted through breath, foregrounding what cannot be said, but must be sensed.
The edit becomes an inhalation,
a pause,
an exhale.
This is what I call filmic breath.
Rather than cutting to define, I use match-on-action edits guided by my own breathing or that of my Irish mother’s breath. In Salt Breath – Not Yet the Sea, I wrote poems to the sea and read them aloud. The breaths between words shaped the rhythm of the visuals. These edits are bodily, so the film itself breathes. This became a way of listening. The sea became a collaborator. I began to hear the UK coastlines differently—through breath, weather, people, and stillness.
An in progress fragment from Salt Breath - Not Yet the Sea (2025)
Filmic Body Series :
Fragments of Shared Air
Each of these works forms part of an ongoing constellation of filmic bodies; distinct yet interconnected film fragments shaped by the methodology of filmic breath. Emerging from ‘private air’ (intimate spaces shaped bodily ecologies and maternal relation), ‘public air’ (encounters with architecture, sea, and pilgrimage), and ‘communal air’ (shared breath in participatory settings), these works are not designed to be consumed passively. They are meant to be felt—activated in shared, embodied space.
The filmic body series resists closure. Each piece is fragmentary and responsive to the conditions of its making: bodies ecologies, atmospheric shifts, maternal relations, transgenerational traces, co-presence with others. Activated through workshops, installations, or listening and reading groups, these films transform depending on the bodies they are shared with. Movement scores, breath-based poetical scripts, and somatic prompts shape the atmosphere in which they are encountered. What holds them together is not narrative, but a “shared air”—spatial, relational, affective.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
Fragmentation as Form
The films are not screened as a single linear work, but in fragments, intervals, and layers, across surfaces, screens, and bodies in motion. Participants encounter them in shifting combinations, guided by somatic prompts developed in dialogue with breath, land, and weather. These scripts attend to what is present and what is absent.
Fragmentation is not a lack but a method. It invites audiences into temporalities of rupture, pause, and partial presence, echoing the lived experiences of bodily ecologies and transgenerational memory.
How the Films Are Encountered
These films are made to be encountered collectively. Embodied workshops, listening and reading groups, and installation contexts are vital to the work. Participants are invited to engage through breath-based somatic scripts, movement scores, and collective attention practices.
These participatory atmospheres are not supplementary but central: they allow the work to breathe differently each time, depending on the bodies present.
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
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.