Sinéad (she/her) is a visual artist and practice-based PhD student in the School of Art at ECA, funded by the University of Edinburgh College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Research Award. She holds a Masters in Contemporary Art Practice with Distinction from Edinburgh College of Art and a First Class Honours in Photography from University of the Arts London.

Her research examines how a particular form of contemporary art practice, fictioning, can be used in the study of waste and wasting. It then considers how employing a fictioning-based practice in a participatory context can be used to expand public discussions on waste and pollution with artists, educators, and children across diverse UK contexts.

As defined by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan in Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (2019), the practice of fictioning consists of ‘performing, diagramming or assembling new and different modes of existence through open-ended experimentation’ (Burrows and O’Sullivan, 2019, p.6). This is produced through a material embodiment (an installation, performance, or intervention in time and place) that muddies the reality/fictional boundary. 

The waste she focuses on consists of by-products of industry and fossil-fuel-derived materials (the many products and chemical processes that infiltrate petrochemical dependant societies) with particular attention given to how these materials disintegrate, leak, merge, soak, and seep. In her practice, she uses fictioning to focus on incomplete processes, dead ends, and a ‘composting’ and ‘dredging’ of materials and meaning. She uses photogrammetry and repetitive casting to fix transitory material in stasis: fused kelp roots are soap-cast, a discarded piece of synthetic rubber doormat produces slip-cast ceramic copies, hot glass fills a sand mould of a digitally enlarged tubeworm fossil. Through duplicating and multiplying, casts become made-strange substitutes, reconfigured for divergent uses across subsequent installations. 

The participatory aspect of her research draws on her professional experience of facilitating art projects with young people (and a specific year-long project responding to the UN Sustainable Development Goals) and finding contradictions in a simplified or solution-based approach for learning about pollution with children. She aims to present ethically considered methods for artists and educators to engage children with discard studies through specific localities and methods from fictioning.