In Brief:

My research blends artistic practice with academic inquiry, moving across film, sound, performance, writing, archival research, embodied workshops, listening and reading groups, and socially engaged artistic practice. Rooted in Irish diasporic maternal memory, the work explores breath, shame, migration, silence, transgenerational inheritance, and relation.

Through Shared Air and Radical Friendship, I develop methods for staying with difficult histories without forcing resolution, disclosure, or spectacle. My practice uses breath-led workshops, collective reading, correspondence, circular readings, filmic and sonic fragments, and living archives to ask how memory is carried through bodies, atmospheres, texts, and shared spaces.

Practice-as-Research (PaR)

My research employs Practice-as-Research (PaR), autoethnography, archival research, and embodied methodologies to challenge conventional research paradigms and create new ways of engaging with personal, cultural, and collective memory. Creative practice is not an illustration of theory, but a mode of thinking in itself: a way of producing knowledge through breath, movement, sound, image, text, silence, and relation.

This interdisciplinary approach contributes to feminist philosophy, memory studies, affect theory, trauma studies, socially engaged art practice, and transnational feminist thought. It enables deeper engagement with what Sara Ahmed calls “histories that hurt” (Ahmed), asking how inherited shame, migration, and institutional violence might be encountered through ethical, embodied, and collective forms.

Embracing Uncertainty & The Unfitting Practice

A key element of my research is the refusal to conform to fixed formats. My practice embraces uncertainty, indeterminacy, hesitation, and the unresolved, positioning these as generative conditions for inquiry.

The challenge of “not fitting” is not only an obstacle but an active methodology. It mirrors the disorientations of transgenerational shame, the ruptures of memory, and the complexities of relation. My work moves between disciplines, spaces, and registers: between film and performance, archive and body, theory and workshop, private memory and public encounter.

Rather than seeking resolution, the work seeks attunement: to breath, to the body, to silence, to partial traces, and to what resists immediate coherence. This open-ended approach allows the work to move beyond academic spaces into community, artistic, institutional, and transnational contexts, where collective memory can be explored through shared, embodied experience.

Embodied Practice: Thinking with the Body

Embodied practice engages the body — its breath, movement, sensations, pauses, hesitations, and affective responses — as a site of knowledge production. It challenges purely discursive models of research by centring lived experience, relational dynamics, and felt knowledge.

In my work, the body is not treated as evidence to be extracted from, but as a site of relation. Breath, gesture, pacing, and silence become ways of listening to what cannot always be spoken. Through shared air, embodied practice becomes a method for staying with grief, shame, memory, and historical inheritance without forcing them into narrative closure.

Shared Air is the central breath-led methodology in my practice. Drawing on Luce Irigaray’s concept of shared air, the project explores breath as a relational, ethical, and political medium.

Beginning from the Irish Catholic maternal relation — particularly mother and daughter — Shared Air attends to how shame, silence, migration, dementia, and institutional histories are carried through the body. Breath becomes a way to remain with what aches, what lingers, and what has not been fully articulated.

Shared Air unfolds through private readings, public performances, filmic breath, sonic fragments, and embodied workshops. It asks how breath might become a method of co-witnessing: a way of being present with difficult histories without demanding exposure, resolution, or repair.

Radical Friendship extends this research into collective and socially engaged forms. Through listening and reading groups, workshops, correspondence, annotation, and shared study, Radical Friendship asks how we might remain in relation across distance, difference, uncertainty, and discomfort.

The Radical Friendship Listening and Reading Group brings together artists, researchers, writers, and practitioners from different countries and disciplines. Each session begins with a text, artwork, film, fragment, or question, and unfolds through slow reading, listening, silence, and discussion.

Radical Friendship is not understood as agreement, sameness, or comfort. It is a practice of careful relation: a way of staying with complexity in a polarised world without collapsing difference or demanding consensus.

Research Methods

My interdisciplinary, practice-based research integrates autobiographical research, archival research, film, sound, performance, embodied workshops, listening and reading groups, correspondence, and living archival installations.

• Autobiographical Research
  My mother’s experience with dementia, alongside Irish diasporic maternal histories, forms part of a wider inquiry into how shame, silence, and memory are transmitted across generations. This research attends to the disorienting effects of trauma on relation, language, and the body.

• Archival Research
  I engage with collections 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. I approach archives through their silences, absences, omissions, and unresolved traces, asking how artistic practice might respond to what cannot be fully documented.

• Embodied Practice and Participatory Research
  Workshops, listening and reading groups, circular readings, and performances form a critical research framework. These spaces invite participants to think through breath, movement, text, image, sound, and shared attention. They are shaped as brave spaces grounded in care, consent, opacity, and co-presence.

• Correspondence and Living Archives
  Letters, notes, citations, marginalia, sound fragments, film stills, annotations, and participant traces are gathered into evolving archival environments. The archive is approached not as a fixed repository, but as something living, relational, partial, and process-led.

  
  
  
  
  

Listening & Reading Groups

Listening and reading groups are central to my socially engaged practice. They create spaces for slow study, collective attention, and embodied engagement with texts, artworks, sound, and archival fragments.

Participants are invited to read, listen, pause, annotate, and respond. Breath, silence, and hesitation are part of the method. These groups do not seek to resolve difficult histories, but to create conditions where participants can stay with them together.

The Radical Friendship Listening and Reading Group expands this practice transnationally, asking how friendship, care, opacity, refusal, and ethical witnessing might be practised through shared study.

Embodied Circular Readings

Embodied circular readings are performative and participatory methodologies that situate histories in action. They draw on feminist ethics of care, brave spaces, and contemporary Irish art practices to create environments where participants can encounter text through breath, voice, movement, and shared presence.

These readings often weave autobiographical fragments, archival traces, theoretical writing, and filmic material. Participants may read aloud, move, listen, breathe, or remain still. Movement is never required; breath itself is enough.

The circular reading becomes a temporary structure for co-presence: a way of holding difficult affect without judgment and allowing knowledge to emerge through relation.

Filmic, Sonic, and Performance-Based Practice

My embodied practice unfolds through interconnected forms:

Performance
Site-responsive and often ephemeral actions exploring breath as “private,” “public,” and “communal” air. These begin with intimate readings and extend into performances at pilgrimage, institutional, domestic, and public sites.

Film & Audio Work:

Filmic breath is a method of editing through inhale, exhale, pause, hesitation, and bodily rhythm. Breath shapes cuts, pacing, duration, and visual sequencing, allowing film to become a somatic and relational language.

Sonic Breath
Sonic breath translates workshop practice, maternal memory, migration, and embodied relation into sound. Through echo, vibration, delay, and silence, sound becomes a way of listening across distance, absence, and inheritance.

Embodied Workshops:

Workshops bring together breath, movement, reading, sound, film, and collective reflection. They create conditions for participants to engage with memory, shame, grief, and relation in ways that are careful, non-extractive, and process-led.

Living Archives and Installations
Archival installations gather sound, film, correspondence, handwritten fragments, workshop residues, and participant traces into spatial environments. These installations remain open and unfinished, inviting return, listening, and contribution.

Key Concepts Explained
At the heart of my practice are embodied methodologies, transnational feminisms, shared air, radical friendship, and living archives.

Embodied methodologies emphasise the lived, sensory, affective, and relational dimensions of knowledge. Transnational feminisms situate these embodied experiences across borders, migration histories, colonial legacies, and uneven structures of power.

Shared air understands breath as a relational medium. Radical friendship offers a way of staying in relation across difference. Living archives approach memory as partial, processual, and collectively formed.

Together, these frameworks allow me to reimagine maternal relations, collective histories, and archival practice through embodied, artistic, and socially engaged research.

For a deeper understanding of these and other key terms and how they relate to my practice, please visit the Glossary page.

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