Our Story

As a rural based independent dance artist-curator-choreographer, Maria Kerin creatively engages with community, heritage and landscape through her unique mix of eco-somatic, multitemporal, sensorial research and performativity. Since first creating a dance piece for her Fine Art Degree show, DIT, ’98, Kerin has been developing a transdisciplinary arts practice; combining artistic, choreographic and curatorial processes, further informed by an MA in Contemporary Dance Performance, UL ’06 and year 1 of practice based dance PhD, UL, 2015, researching decision making through somatic principles.

Maria has facilitated peer-to-peer sharing through ethical states of receptivity, deep listening and the multi-temporal body in Ireland, England, Estonia, Latvia, Finland and Sweden. As lead Irish artist/curator with Karum-Creevagh, a Swedish-Irish trans-disciplinary Art & Archaeology group, from 2016 to 2022, Maria contributed to ‘Experimental Heritage’ as a new field of study.

Maria’s translocal focus is on expanding Project Affectionate, a participatory eco-somatic community dance collective in North Clare and facilitating creative movement workshops on seasonal eco-somatic well-being through her shared practice; Re-Wilding Bodies.

A member of Praxis, VAI, Dance Ireland and a volunteer with Fáilte Isteach and Back to Earth community ecology group, peace and water wellbeing activist, a sailor and a biodynamic herb gardener with two Maine Coon cats. 

www.mariakerin.blogspot.com

Rachel Sweeney is a dancer, environmental educator and creative facilitator originally from Waterford, with over thirty years’ experience facilitating creative outreach work in Ireland and the UK. She works at the intersections of environmental health and creative arts, and her work is always centred on ecological wellbeing as a meaningful way to connect people and place. Rachel has worked in Higher Education for over twenty years where her teaching is adapted widely to a changing educational landscape, moving quite fluently between Creative Arts and Environmental Humanities. She has worked as Head of Academic Programmes for a small and progressive ecological college and transformative education centre, Schumacher College in Devon, where she also led the Master’s Degree program in Movement Mind and Ecology. Prior to this she led on a Dance degree program at Liverpool Hope University (2009 – 2021), specialising in classroom to community initiatives and linking dance students across Liverpool’s health and cultural sectors. Rachel is a member of the current Schumacher Wild ecological learning community and also the Regenerative Learning Network, a Futures Education consultancy.

Recent arts work in Ireland includes a Creative Places dance and health residency in Tipperary, where she is developing adaptive and inclusive Céili dance workshops together with the Irish Wheelchair Association, and the post of Creative Collaborator for a Creative Ireland climate initiative, working with Kildare County Council and the Climate Research Hub at Maynooth University.

www.rachelsweeney.org