Artist Biographies
Maria and Rachel met in 2018 and share a keen interest in cultivating sensorially-informed and sustainable movement practice that operates in dynamic contrast to the shorter timelines and productive conventions that often sit within more established artistic production modes. Honouring a translocal practice - both online and in person - has enabled this artistic exchange to navigate in response to altered spatialities and mobilities.
Maria Kerin
As a rural based independent artist-curator-choreographer,
Maria Kerin creatively engages with heritage and landscape through enactive embodiment and somatic, multi-temporal performativity. Since first creating a dance piece in Fine Art, DIT, ’98, Kerin has been developing an intra-disciplinary arts practice, interwoven with artistic, choreographic and curatorial processes, informed by an MA in Contemporary Dance, UL ’06 and year 1 of PhD, UL, 2015, researching decision making through somatic principles.
In a creative co-aligning through The Future is Domestic (2008-2013) Post Domestic; The Future is the Forest, (2014- 2018), facilitating peer-to-peer sharing through ethical states of receptivity, deep listening and the multi-temporal body in Ireland, Estonia, Finland and Sweden, community building with Outrider Artists, Ankor, and Raft, led Maria Kerin to being invited as lead Irish artist/curator with Karum-Creevagh, a Swedish-Irish trans-disciplinary Art & Archaeology group, 2016 onwards, building ‘Experimental Heritage’ as a new field of study. Researching with Rachel Sweeney since 2019 in a post site-specific turn, virtually and in residencies, building communities of knowledge in a slow but urgent devotion to radical change with The Floating Village, commissioned by Waterford Arts, 2021 and Ode to Lickeen Lake, commissioned by Water Conservation Ireland, 2021.
Rachel Sweeney
Rachel’s movement practice is grounded in ecological thinking around transdisciplinary approaches to body-place relationships. She is a currently Program Lead for the MA in Movement Mind and Ecology at Schumacher College, Devon and was Head of Dance at Liverpool Hope University (2009-2021).
Rachel’s movement research actively applies somatic processes in non-traditional performance spaces and for diverse communities, identifying choreographic practice per se as a social tool, informed by studies in posthumanism, geopolitics and art activism. Initially framed through an AHRC awarded practice-based PhD, locating Butoh and Body Weather training praxis in relation to inter-sense relationships in site-based performance, her academic profile is strongly invested in transdisciplinary research framed through sensuous scholarship. She was Visiting Fellow for the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University (2012) in response to their research theme of ‘Ecological Enlightenment’ and worked as a Centre Fellow for the Centre for Sustainable, University of Plymouth (2007-08), designing inter-departmental sustainability practices within curriculum, campus and local community. She is a founder member of Orr and Sweeney (UK/AUS) with whom she has facilitated transnational residential art and ecology residencies in response to flood and fire management and in collaboration with Dartmoor National Park Authorities (UK) and The Centre for Interdisciplinary Arts (Perth, Australia).
