WHAT

Tall forest trees. Vast expanses of sky. The way that certain music has space in it.

That feeling you get when you move to a particular song.

Feelings like this have always made me feel like I am connected to something outside of myself, something bigger than me, and I have had the drive to understand and share this feeling from the moment in primary school when I first felt it. I never had the words for it though. It has always eluded my attempts at verbal description.

I am currently working with sound, gaze and movement to explore the coming together of these senses and how they contribute to this feeling of expansion.

WHY

I have had a long search to try to articulate this feeling and share it. From the moment I first experienced it in my primary school playground through to other times in my life. Especially when the feeling of expansion lifted me up during a time of trauma and grief. As a trained talking therapist I am used to working with emotions, but this feeling is not cognitive and this is what fascinates me. The more I explore the more I see that our sensory world and our relationship to the space around us is part of our feeling states. I also want to advocate for more appreciation of our sensory worlds and particularly the peak, aesthetic and expansive feeling states that we have access to through our senses.

HOW

My work currently uses sound and moving image to create the conditions for these feeling states to be felt by other people.
An installation is in development.

Previous iterations of this work have involved text art, poetry, installations and songwriting. It was during my MMus degree in 2024 that I finally found the territory for my enquiry whilst researching musical awe. A discussion of the sense of vastness and how we sense space pre-cognitively. I have been researching awe, expansiveness, flow states and the sensing of space ever since.

Current work is supported by Arts Council Wales.