Why My Practice-Based Research Matters

My practice-based research matters because it asks how art can create spaces for staying with difficult histories without forcing resolution, exposure, or spectacle.

Working across film, sound, performance, writing, embodied workshops, listening and reading groups, and living archival installation, my practice explores breath, memory, Irish diasporic inheritance, maternal relation, shame, silence, and transgenerational trauma.

At its centre is a question of relation:
How do we remain with one another across difference, discomfort, vulnerability, and histories that hurt?

Through Shared Air and Radical Friendship, I develop artistic methods that bring people together through breath, collective listening, shared reading, correspondence, movement, and care. These methods bridge academic research, socially engaged artistic practice, and public encounter.

Breath, Memory, and Relation

My research begins from the body: from breath, silence, gesture, affect, illness, care, and memory.

Breath is not only a physical act. In my work, breath becomes a way of listening, relating, and staying present with what cannot always be spoken. Drawing on Luce Irigaray’s concept of shared air, I explore how breath can open forms of connection without erasing difference.

The histories I work with — Irish Catholic maternal shame, migration, institutional control, dementia, secrecy, and silence — are not only personal. They are cultural, political, and transgenerational. They move through families, archives, institutions, bodies, rooms, and atmospheres.

My practice asks how these histories might be approached through care and attention, rather than through extraction or forced disclosure.

Why Embodied Methodologies Matter

Embodied methodologies challenge the idea that knowledge only happens through language, explanation, or distance.

In my workshops, performances, and listening spaces, knowledge emerges through breath, movement, rhythm, silence, hesitation, and shared presence. Participants are invited to read, listen, pause, move, write, or simply remain with what is unfolding.

This matters because many difficult histories do not arrive as complete narratives. They arrive as fragments, bodily sensations, inherited silences, repeated gestures, or atmospheres that are hard to name.

Embodied practice allows these histories to be encountered without needing to make them fully visible or resolved. It creates space for partial knowledge, uncertainty, and ethical relation.

Radical Friendship in a Polarised World

In an increasingly polarised world, my practice asks how we might gather differently.

It is not friendship as sameness, agreement, or comfort. It is friendship as a practice of staying in relation across difference, discomfort, distance, and uncertainty.

Through the Radical Friendship Listening and Reading Group, workshops, and collective study, I create spaces where people can think and feel together without pressure to reach consensus. These spaces value silence, opacity, hesitation, and careful attention.

This matters because public life often demands speed, certainty, exposure, and reaction. Radical friendship offers another rhythm: slower, more careful, more relational. It asks how art can support forms of connection that do not depend on agreement, but on the willingness to remain present.

Living Archives and Cultural Memory

My work also matters because it reimagines what an archive can be.

Rather than treating the archive as a fixed repository of documents, I approach it as something living, relational, and unfinished. Letters, handwritten fragments, sound, film, breath scores, citations, participant notes, and workshop traces become part of an evolving ecology of memory.

This approach is important when working with histories marked by silence, absence, shame, or institutional control. Some histories cannot be fully recovered. Some should not be forced into visibility. Some remain partial, withheld, or difficult to document.

A living archive allows memory to be held differently: through relation, correspondence, listening, repetition, and shared attention.

Socially Engaged Practice and Public Responsibility

My practice is socially engaged because it creates spaces where art, theory, lived experience, and community can meet.

This work has unfolded in artist residencies, universities, schools, community settings, online spaces, public workshops, exhibitions, and informal gatherings. Across these contexts, I have worked with young people, students, artists, researchers, adult learners, and community participants.

Facilitation is central to the work. I create spaces that are carefully structured but open-ended, where participants can engage at their own pace. These spaces are shaped by feminist ethics of care, consent, access, opacity, and co-presence.

The impact of this work is often quiet but significant. It may happen through a shared silence, a conversation after a workshop, a participant encountering a text differently, a group listening together, or a new collaboration beginning.

This is why the work matters beyond academia. It creates conditions for collective reflection, ethical encounter, and new forms of relation.

Teaching, Learning, and Transformation

My teaching and facilitation practice has always been connected to my artistic research.

Across schools, universities, and community contexts, I have developed spaces where people can encounter film, photography, writing, theory, and art as tools for thinking differently about the world. These environments encourage collaboration rather than competition, and invite participants to value their own lived experience as a form of knowledge.

This commitment continues in my work as a Visiting Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where I teach through socially engaged, embodied, and experimental methods.

For me, teaching is not separate from art practice. It is one of the places where the practice becomes public, relational, and transformative.

Wider Constellations

My practice contributes to feminist philosophy, memory studies, trauma studies, affect theory, socially engaged art, and practice-based research. It does so by insisting that breath, body, care, silence, and relation are not secondary to knowledge — they are central to how knowledge is made, shared, and transformed.

Rooted in Irish diasporic experience, the work speaks outward to wider questions of migration, institutional violence, maternal memory, cultural silence, and collective responsibility.

Ultimately, my research matters because it asks how we might remain with what hurts without reproducing harm. It asks how we might listen without extracting, gather without demanding sameness, and build archives that remain alive to complexity.

It proposes that art can help us practise relation differently.

Closing Line

The work matters because it creates spaces where breath, memory, silence, and relation can be held together — carefully, collectively, and without rushing toward resolution.