Sonic Bodies

Shared Air: Embodied Fragments

In brief:

Resonant Ecologies in Fragments, Breath, and Shared Air

Sonic Bodies is an emerging constellation of sound works and embodied methodologies shaped by breath, listening, transnational feminist philosophy, maternal relations, and transgenerational memory. Like Filmic Bodies, these works do not stand alone but form an interconnected ecology—an archive of atmospheres, resonances, and traces that exceed language. At the heart of this practice is sonic breath: a methodology where breath guides rhythm, pacing, and relation.

Influenced by Luce Irigaray’s concept of “shared air,” this approach listens for what lingers in the intervals, the echoes, and the vibrations that pass between bodies. Sonic Bodies foreground resonance and co-presence over resolution, opening fragile, reparative encounters. They ask: how do we listen together across unequal and inherited conditions? These works emerge through embodied workshops, site-responsive processes, and transmissions that reach across distance and delay.

Sonic Bodies

Relational Ecologies in Breath, Echo, and Sonic Presence

Shared Air: Sonic Fragments, Maternal Echoes

Shared Air: Sonic Fragments, Maternal Echoes is the first sound work in this constellation.

The piece is composed through the sonic logic of breath, beginning with a simple question: what does it mean to listen to one of my embodied workshops – not in the room, but later, elsewhere, through the body rather than the eyes? The gesture remains attentive to breath as both shared and contested.

Born in London to an Irish mother and a British father, my practice is rooted in the lived experience of Irish migration. This informs my exploration of Irish Catholic maternal shame, migration, and memory through philosophy, film, performance, and embodied workshops – reimagining maternal relations as sites of transformation.

My workshops are shaped by breath, silence, and relational presence. Participants engage with silenced histories through performances that weave archival and personal text with fragments of films. These films are edited according to the rhythm of breath, a method I call filmic breath. Emerging from performances in “private air” with my mother and “public air” at Marian sites, the workshops stage encounters where bodily and filmic breath converge to form “shared air”: a co-created atmosphere of presence, attunement, and suspended time.

Philosopher Luce Irigaray’s concept of “shared air” grounds this project. Breath, for her, is not only respiration but relational: it mediates our coexistence with others. To bring awareness to breath is to first cultivate autonomy before reaching toward the other. Breath becomes a method of co-witnessing, of dwelling with what exceeds language, and of navigating inherited silences. It offers a fragile yet reparative encounter: a way of staying in relation without resolving or erasing.

While my practice is rooted in film, this work marks an experimental shift: to work with sound alone—sonic breath. This is not documentation, but transmission: a delayed resonance, a fragment rerouted through shifting temporalities. The work asks how a sonic fragment might world bodies that are not physically present – how breath might offer a different kind of intimacy, through echo, pause, and vibration.

In this way, the piece is grounded in transnational feminist practice: where listening becomes a method of co-witnessing, where breath carries what exceeds language, and where sonic presence holds space for ambiguity, memory, and inherited trauma. Remaining attentive to breath that is not equally granted, protected, or received, “shared air” becomes our method: inviting us to breathe together, even across distance, delay, and dislocation. It is a way of metabolising what was passed down unspoken, and of dwelling in what still lingers.

First Airing

Though arising from Irish diasporic contexts, the composition will first be aired as part of Radio Elsewheres [re.03], Oct 16 – Nov 5, 2025, at Art Windsor-Essex, Windsor, ON radioelsewheres.net. From there, the work speaks across geographies to the entangled experience of borders – not only territorial, but bodily, psychic, and relational.

Water figures as threshold and archive: the Detroit River, separating Windsor and Detroit, and the Irish Sea marking colonial and migratory passages between Ireland and England. This piece lingers in the thresholds. I embody my mother and grandmother who left Ireland; I cross that sea as I continuously make the passage back and forth. My practice explores what it means to inherit the afterlives of migration, religious and state control on bodies, and maternal silence. I ask how breath becomes a method of navigating these collective thresholds.

Edited from an unsettled body, this piece searches for the echoes of those who came before – traces carried within, carried across, and carried in the air we share.