Poetic Fragments

(2024 - onwards)

In Brief

These fragments accompany my filmic and sonic breath practice. They are short poems, notes, scores, and breath-texts composed in rhythm with illness, stillness, travel, Irish diasporic memory, maternal inheritance, water, weather, and shared air.

They emerge from hospital beds, temporary coastal rooms, ferry routes, train journeys, workshops, residencies, windows, shorelines, and moments of post-surgical movement. Some are written in stillness. Others arrive through walking, listening, travelling, breathing, and gathering with others.

The fragments are not separate from the films, workshops, or installations. They move with them. They become scripts, scores, subtitles, readings, voiceovers, workshop prompts, and traces within living archives.

They ask:

How does breath become language?
How does illness alter time?
How does a fragment hold what cannot become a full story?
How might writing move between body, place, and relation?

A Poetics of Shared Air

These fragments are shaped by my ongoing research into shared air — breath as a relational, embodied, and political medium.

Writing becomes a way of staying with what cannot be easily spoken: maternal memory, shame, grief, chronic pain, migration, care, and the afterlives of institutional and religious histories. The fragments do not seek to explain these experiences fully. They hold them partially, rhythmically, and atmospherically.

As the daughter who arrives later, I write through traces of Irish transgenerational memory, holding the presence of my mother, grandmother, and the women whose stories move through family, archive, silence, and breath.

The poems move between stillness and motion, rupture and reconfiguration, inside and outside, sea and room, body and world.

Filmic Breath and Poetic Scores

Many of these fragments accompany works such as Salt Breath — Not Yet the Sea, Poetics of Filmic Breath, and Shared Air: Sonic Fragments, Maternal Echoes.

They often begin as breath-texts: lines written aloud, recorded, repeated, and edited through inhale, pause, and exhale. The rhythm of the poem may shape the rhythm of the film. The breath between words may guide the cut. A line may become a sound fragment, a projected text, or a prompt within an embodied workshop.

In this way, the poems become part of the filmic body. They do not describe the image. They breathe beside it.

Illness, Stillness, Movement

This writing is shaped by a bodily ecology affected by endometriosis, chronic pain, and altered time.

Illness changes how the world is approached. It slows movement, interrupts plans, intensifies attention, and makes the body’s rhythms difficult to ignore. The fragments emerge from this altered temporality: from waiting, resting, recovering, travelling carefully, and sensing the world through limited energy.

But they are not only poems of stillness. They also carry the desire for movement — toward water, toward air, toward the coast, toward gathering, toward the possibility of reworlding.

A window becomes a shoreline.
A hospital bed becomes a threshold.
A room becomes a listening space.
A breath becomes a way back into the world.

Water, Weather, Threshold

Water recurs throughout these fragments.

The sea, rain, rivers, lakes, steam, salt, and bodies of water become ways of thinking about memory, migration, maternal relation, and transformation. Water holds and unsettles. It carries traces. It erodes and returns. It refuses to stay still.

Alongside works such as Salt Breath — Not Yet the Sea, the fragments offer a poetics of shared air and salt water: breath hovering across geographies, bodies, climates, and inherited conditions.

They ask how we breathe together across unequal worlds, and how writing might respond to bodily autonomy, environmental exposure, illness, and collective care.

Poetic Fragments as Living Archive

The fragments form part of my wider living archival practice.

They may appear as handwritten notes, printed texts, marginalia, projected lines, spoken scores, sound fragments, or workshop materials. They move between page, voice, body, room, and image.

Some are written alone. Some emerge through listening and movement practices within embodied workshops. In these shared spaces, poems are not only read but activated: held in breath, touch, silence, gesture, and collective attention.

When played alongside film fragments or sound works, they become part of a co-constructed atmosphere shaped by those present.

The poem becomes a trace.
The trace becomes a score.
The score becomes an invitation.
The invitation becomes shared air.

Workshops and Shared Reading

Some fragments are activated within embodied workshops and listening and reading groups.

Participants may encounter them as spoken invitations, breath scores, projected text, or material placed in the room. In these contexts, the poems are not fixed literary objects. They become relational prompts: openings into breath, memory, movement, stillness, and response.

They ask how language moves between bodies.
How silence touches a line.
How breath alters meaning.
How a fragment can hold space without closing it.

Closing Line

These fragments are small ways of breathing toward the world: partial, salt-marked, unfinished, and still moving.