Dr Karen Heald

I was invited to collaborate on an artist residency by interdisciplinary artist Angela Davies, called Golau (Light) in 2013. This Arts Council Wales funded project was undertaken at Ruthin Craft Centre. Themes of time and place were explored in response to the architectural framework and the geologically sculpted landscape of Chirk Castle.

Intrinsic to this residency, was the collaboration between other artists working in different disciplines, who included: Angelina Kornecka a Butoh dancer; Francesca Simmons a multi-instrumental performer, Ant Dickinson a musician, sound designer and technologist and Paula Budd a costume designer.

Golau (Light) served to generate multi-sensory and multidisciplinary responses to the memory of place, resulting in a number of site-specific installations and performative works that emulated the response to the castle and experience of the landscape.

Given the parallel interests in time and place I was excited to be invited to take part in Golau (Light) and found the process of the collaboration an inspiration. Filming for two intense days in the interior and exterior spaces of Chirk Castle, I worked intuitively with Butoh dancer Angelina Kornecka. The results were emotive movements which captured the shift in light and portrayed intimate moments in time through the camera lens. The editing and presentation process reiterated the Butoh sense of meditation, minimalism and being 'in-between'.

The project culminated in the first site-responsive art exhibition at Chirk Castle, Chirk, Wales in 2014.

https://www.karenheald.co.uk/projects-golau2

One of the 5 films I created as part of Golau (Light) called Lateral Flight was then selected to be screened as part of Weaving Narratives in St Asaph Cathedral, Wales, with Angela Davies & Angelina Kornecka in 2015.

Public Map Platform (PMP) exhibition and film screenings at Pontio, Bangor University, Bangor. This exhibition visulises the cultural aspect of the PMP, AHRC funded research project, with young people, creative practitioners – Bards and the people and organisations from the Isle of Anglesey / Ynys  Môn, Wales, https://publicmap.org

Selected to create Work in Progress which encompassed over 40 contemporary artists, designers and makers to reflect on contemporary practice and individual values in a collective exposition at the international gallery, Ty Pawb, in Wrexham, Wales. The collective included new and emerging artists, the programme team, and past alumni from the MA programmes at the Wrexham School of Art. Together a shared space was created and curated for dialogues around subjects including social and civic issues, the environment, health, cultural identity, sustainability and education.

Together Karen Heald & Susan Matthews and I tested the space-time theory out further, that we explored in the installation The Time Keeper and the Hour Glass by creating a new short audio visual installation Tsuyu / Plum Rain, 2025, along with a contextualising presentation specific for the symposia Tsuyu / Plum Rain: Visual Analysis in Contemporary Art, in Gdańsk, Poland that explores Metamorphoses of Time.

Incorporating contemporary footage filmed during a recent visit to Japan, in 2023, in June the ‘month of water’, Tsuyu/Plum Rain, explored water in different complexities - raindrops, mist, ritual pools – in juxtaposed slow paced and high speed environments, experienced in Japan and Wales.

https://www.karenheald.co.uk/-tsuyu-/-plum-rain-visual-analysis-in-contemporary-art

https://www.2025conference.pl/

This audio visual multi-media installation was the result of an ongoing collaboration with south Wales based sound artist Susan Matthews. Here we explored our mutual interests in time through our connected time based media, albeit using different medium, and our shared interests in space and place which forms our conceptual synthesis. The intension was always to exhibit the single channel, 10 minute film, The Timekeeper and the Hour Glass, onto multiple projection screens as an installation with objects and sound. The opportunity to do this was created when Susan and I submitted a proposal to exhibit at Stiwdio Griffith in Swansea, Wales. This enabled the artists’ moving image and sound to further portray poetic nonlinear aspects of time. Working together in the gallery we had 5 days to experiment and test out our pieces which included physical objects (engraved glass spheres and books) as well as a live performance with George Saxon that further complimented, reflected upon and drew tension to the themes explored in the piece. 

The 5 films were projected onto walls of the gallery space, on LCD screens positioned on the floor and propped up against the structural pillars, which prior to its current use had been a library. Three of the films repeated the 10 minute duration of The Timekeeper and The Hour Glass, 1 film was taken directly from the film (Intangible Fluidity), and another film (Paper Interior) added a human element to the predominately abstract geological scenes. 3 audio sound tracks split across 6 portable speakers filled the room and filtered out of the space. Like the water that dominated the visuals, as the observer moves around the gallery space, the audio appeared fluid, merging and separating depending on location. The viewer never experienced the same combination of image and sound which emphasised the passage of and transient nature of time, together with its nonlinear qualities. 

By curating physical objects and placing them into the space, these interacted with the audio, and moving images sometimes vibrating, or holding tactile experiences for the audience. 

A further iteration of The Timekeeper and the Hourglass project involved a site-specific live performative action exploring time, space and collaborative praxis. We chose to work with performance artist George Saxon who provided a poetic response to the installation. His poem was printed onto paper and cut into fragments which we glued into 3 books. On the opening night of the exhibition, the performance began with the 3 artists standing still and silent against 3 pillars in the centre of the gallery space. Slowly, we began to move, reciting the fragments, responding intuitively to the space, the moment, the audience, and each other. 

Selected films and images from the exhibition are documented on the websites below:

https://www.karenheald.co.uk/the-timekeeper-and-the-hour-glass

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGioZGQNmqK/?igsh=azM5dnI5bGdzZGVy

The Timekeeper and the Hour Glass was a film I created for the 18th International Society of the Study of Time (ISST) in collaboration with the Research Institute of Time Studies (RITS) and the Japanese Society for Time Studies (JSTS), in Yamaguchi, Japan. Yamaguchi University, in June 2023. The title of the conference was Time and the Machine and the film I presented was part of my paper presentation as well as at the accompanying art exhibition. At this stage the film existed as a single channel with a 10” 6’ duration, with audio by sound artist Susan Matthews and curated by Emily di Carlo. The piece existed with 7 other artists films shown on a loop to conference participants. 

https://studyoftime.org/conferences/yamaguchi-2023/abstracts/

In attempting to articulate the abstractness of time via the visual analysis of artist moving image and poetic nonlinear aspects of time, I have developed a transition between a tripartite system:

•       In-between-ness
•       Being in-between
•       Transitory strata

which with audience interaction can contribute to a new filmic landscape.

The paper was submitted as a book chapter and will be available from Brill Publishers in Autumn 2025, details listed below:

Heald, K. (2025) book chapter The Timekeeper and the Hour Glass in Time and the Machine edited by Arkadiusz Misztal, Stephanie Nelson, and Walter Schweidler. Leiden: Brill Publishers. 

The intention was always to show the film as an installation which Susan and I realised at Stiwido Griffith, Swansea in 2025. 

In-between-ness: Using art to capture the changes to the self during antidepressant treatment

The In-between-ness 3 year pilot study was a novel collaboration between professional artists, clinical researchers and people suffering from depression; to extend the exploration of experiential effects of antidepressant treatment. The research team worked closely with the participants at the Hergest Psychiatrist Unit, Bangor to explore the effects of treatment for depression.

Through this arts and science research pilot the collaborators Dr Richard Tranter, (Consultant Psychiatrist), Professor Rob Poole, (Professor of Social Psychiatry and Co-Director of the Centre for Mental Health and Society, UK), GP surgeries, and artists Susan Liggett and myself, Karen Heald explored if patient changes were reflected in the way people express themselves and respond to their environment prior, during and post antidepressant medication.

In addition to the aims of the psychiatrists, as artists, myself and Susan Liggett were keen to explore the role of preverbal language and creativity for patients navigating the ‘in-between-ness’ from depression to recovery through the creative use of video cameras.

Susan and I worked one-to-one with the participants to explore how their view of themselves changed as they recovered from depression. This involved seeing patients before, during and after their treatment. The participants were asked to respond to visual prompts seen in the photographs here which were introduced as a stimulus for the patients to make artworks using a video camera. Participants met with Susan and I on a weekly basis after having been administered medication by the trial psychiatrist.

The artworks, with consent, were displayed in exhibitions, discussed at conferences and formed part of an artist’s books made collaboratively between myself and the participants.

The response to the In-between-ness pilot study also involved me taking the practice outside of the clinical setting to other environments with my established collaborator, glass artist Chris Bird-Jones and dancer and choreographer Daisy Farris.

https://www.karenheald.co.uk/research-in-between-ness/

http://www.addocreative.com/portfolio/in-between-ness/

The collaborative research practice was disseminated via international exhibitions (including the Venice Biennale, Italy), as well as at international film festivals (LIFF, Leeds, England), and conferences (European League of International Art Educators (ELIA), Vienna, Austria) + (Royal College of Psychiatry International Congress), Edinburgh, UK + Slippage: The Unstable Nature of Difference Contemporary Art Space Chester (CASC), University of Chester, England.

https://axisweb.org/artist/karenheald-1/full-portfolio

https://results2021.ref.ac.uk/outputs/3044ce17-baa7-4509-b000-f364202e81a6?page=1

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305347201_In-between-ness_Using_art_to_capture_changes_to_the_self_during_anti-depressant_treatment

Trywydd . Voyage (2014-2016) was an international art project by artist Karen Heald and Chris Bird-Jones. Chris is an artist and educator working primarily in glass. Collectively known as Bird-Jones & Heald we are baseboth d in Wales, UK.

In the summer of 2014, Bird-Jones & Heald, filmed material inspired by collectively viewing significant architectural glass sites, artists' studios and museums throughout France during the 2014 Women's International Glass Workshop (WIGN). We captured visual details, including figures silhouetted against illuminated backdrops, hand gestures, composite interiors, changing landscapes and emerging patterns.

17 international glass artists took part in the WIGN in France in 2014, and part of this body of research focused on the Welsh artists: Chris Bird-Jones, Amber Hiscott, Catrin Jones and myself, Karen Heald. Trywydd . Voyage (film duration 24’ 57") explored the intimacy, quality, nuances, details, sensitivity and beauty of the Welsh centric aspect of this journey.

Trywydd . Voyage premiered as an in-conversation at the Mission Gallery, Swansea (2015) and was later screened along with an audience in-conversation at Oriel Sycharth, Wrexham (2016). It was then exhibited with the artworks created by the international glass artists at the Jean Mauret Gallery, La Grange aux Verrières, Saint-Hilaire en Lignières, in France (2016).

The project was kindly supported by Arts Council Wales and Wales Arts International.

https://www.karenheald.co.uk/trywydd-voyage

https://www.missiongallery.co.uk/events/lunchtime-talk/

http://www.grange-verrieres.com/grange-verrieres-preambule-exposition2016.php

Be Our Guest (2013) was a site-specific response + multi-media installation by Karen Heald and Chris Bird-Jones, and collectively we are known as Bird-Jones & Heald. Together we collaborated on various artworks and performances as part of an exhibition called Be Our Guest at Oriel Davies Gallery, and The Gro guesthouse, Wales (2013). Reviewing the exhibition in Artist Newsletter, Ellen Bell, wrote:

'Prior to the rise of the 1970s' cheap package deals to Magaluf and Benidorm, holidaying at seaside guest houses was the main option for the British working class. An extension of the boarding house, these were meant to be a home from home - affordable, convenient and friendly. Be Our Guest, featuring work from over 30 artists, is a wry look at the institution of the bed and breakfast and its awkward smudging between what is public and private, and a stranger and a guest.'

'In one of the bedrooms Bird-Jones & Heald's The Swing, 2013 projects a juddering line of light across the floor in which a child can be seen swaying back and forth. Such imagery holds us together in the warm embrace of universal memory.' Ellen Bell, a-n Interface, 2013.

Writing in This is Tomorrow, Billie Tilley notes:

'The artists and curators involved in Be Our Guest have reached into the B&B's pilgrim past and tourist town soul to create an unmissable exhibition in a gem of a gallery... In Bird-Jones & Heald's The Swing (2013), footage of an idly swinging girl is projected onto the mirror of an antique wardrobe. The ghostly reflection beautifully evokes the fleeting quality of dream and memory.' Billie Tilley, 2013

Bird-Jones & Heald also exhibited additional site-specific performances and works in The Gro Guest House, Newtown, where Chris and I stayed to research ideas for the show at Oriel Davies Gallery. During the site-specific exhibition The Gro guest house welcomed visitors to view the artworks as well as offering afternoon tea.

https://www.karenheald.co.uk/be-our-guest-1

https://orieldavies.org/whats-on/be-our-guest-1

Whilst on a research trip to China, Mongolia and Japan in 2007, I travelled via the Trans-Mongolian railway. My journey through Asia gave me the opportunity to experience time and sleep in different locations and its meaning to other cultures. My relationship to travelling became paramount to my photography and film work. By investigating the politics of location, I questioned what sleep and the body meant cross culturally and in different spaces. Through lens-based media, I explored time and what it might mean as a woman to be 'staging' sleep performances in different spaces and locations. Sleep was looked at from a physical viewpoint, and through the unconscious and imagination through dreaming. Dreaming allows entrances to simultaneous time zones and here interest in it evolved, coming to fruition in Japan, through research for The Dream Space. The photography and films created as part of The Dream Space explored sleep experiences in contrasting spaces in Japan, from the 'capsule' hotels designed for speed and mass capitalisation, to a Buddhist temple, requiring reflection, ritual and spirituality. The work questioned the notion of the observer and the observed, as I investigated the varying viewpoints of the camera lens and explored what happens when women are both sides of the camera.

Karen Heald in collaboration with Takeko Akamatsu, Rachael Kearney, Yosuke Kawamura, The Dream Space was funded by Wales Arts International (WAI). The preliminary artworks were exhibited and toured Japan via MOBIUM (a mobile museum). Venues included the Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto and the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), University of Nagoya, Japan, 2007.

http://www.mobium.org/program/dreamspace/index_e.html

https://www.karenheald.co.uk/the-dream-space-2

The Box (2007) is a video / sculpture that proceeded Embryonic (2006). Both artworks are by Karen Heald and Chris Bird-Jones. Collectively known as Bird-Jones & Heald and based in Wales, UK. 

Embryonic was the first of a series of collaborative works. The result was a collaborative installation utilising translucency and transparency in both film and kiln formed glass. Two years ago both artists identified a common interest and focus in each other’s work concerning light and movement. Heald was developing projections of her film works onto objects and Bird-Jones was experimenting with moving image in glass. The ensuing collaboration set out to explore how joining both media could enhance the effect of the ephemeral qualities common to both film and glass. These qualities were taken to be: translucency and transparency; and the static quality of glass created from liquid and the dynamic form of video film based on static script or code. Several glass samples were produced and experimented with by the collaborators in the studio. They experimented with Bullseye and Float glass, tack fusing crushed base glass seeking an appropriate and evocative surface to receive the projected film. Material and visual research was conducted concerning scale, size, fixings and juxtaposition of material.

The Box was an immediate response to Embryonic and comprised of a responsive experimental film, which Heald shot in Madrid and which documented the performance of Bird-Jones’ journey through the city, with a wooden crate, from the hotel to the MAVA gallery. Constructed by Burd-Jones & Heald, the wooden crate’s initial purpose was to protect the Embryonic glass receiver during its journey from the UK to Spain. The film was then mutually developed and presented encased within an additional box. It was exhibited as an object in September 2006 at the GIG gallery in Sydney, Australia, as a collaborative work.
 
Embryonic (2006), is in the permanent collection of Museo Municipal de Arte Contemporáneo en Vidrio de Alcorcón-MAVA, Madrid, Spain. Bird-Jones & Heald, 2006-2007.

https://wlv.openrepository.com/items/44ca830e-23a8-4e3b-bcec-709142c19203

https://www.karenheald.co.uk/projects-main#projects-the-box

The notion of the audience's relationship to the artwork was considered when I undertook an art residency with collaborator Elizia Volkmann in 7 quiet Acts of Domestic Violence (7qADV). This series of live art events took place over a seven-week period in 58 Shelmerdine Close, a condemned maisonette in the East End of London (2010). The artistic enquiry was curated by Tanya Cottingham, its last tenant, to mark the final months of the maisonette's life. The building complex was a low rise, grey concrete quadrangle, which had been degraded from its post-war architectural intention to be a new form of community living that was seen as more idealistic than the old terraces it had replaced. Now, in its turn, it was scheduled for demolition after becoming a decaying ghetto beleaguered by crime.

As the temporary tenant of 58 Shelmerdine Close, a Bow Arts live/work flat, Cottingham set out to highlight the politics and prejudices of urban space by deconstructing private place and social reality through this series of seven 'Acts'. Taking place over seven weekends in the autumn, Cottingham invited artists to spend six days responding to the flat, which culminated in a closing event to a participatory guest audience. Elizia and I, collectively known as K&E, were the final act of the series. Working with the whole house, Act 7 had multiple layers. We created artworks, live and recorded performances, following the week-long residency. This concluded with a public view by invitation. The exhibition was about process - interventions, happenings and interactions, crossing Fine Art genres. The emphasis was on layering and experimentation while mainly incorporating found objects.

Three months prior to the residency, Elizia and I arranged a site visit to the building and local area in preparation for the work. We took photographs and produced an archive of the building in its transitional phase. Bearing in mind the title of the series, with its emphasis on quiet, and given that the maisonette was both a domestic home and an art space, we wanted to produce something that challenged the audience in subtle and ambiguous ways. Our proposal had been to collect and transform objects that we obtained from Freecycle. Behind the concept was the recognition of Freecycle's community network and the fact that many women and their children flee their homes, leaving all their personal possessions, to escape domestic violence and consequently set up home again from 'scratch'.

Elizia and I had decided beforehand that we would invite our audience via the Freecycle network so that a good percentage of our audience were unaware as to what they were coming to. Guests were invited via posts saying - Small boxed art works to give away to make way for larger works. We boiled a huge vat of chicken soup and oven warmed bread. The soup strategy proved to be incredibly important it was not only very welcomed but also collapsed and pre-conceptions. Suddenly people were stepping into a house, possibly a home. The entire house filled with the soup's aroma creating a feeling of hospitality for our 'guests'. As the afternoon progressed, people started to chose their artworks and to take part in the cutting up and boxing of them. The site gave context to the work and enabled the audience to connect with issues associated with the family environment while engaging with professional Fine Art practice. In creating performances, which incorporated time-based media, we implemented a positive transformation encouraging optimism and sanguinity. 

To see this project - Act 7 - and the other Acts 1-6 all curated by Tanya Cottingham please visit: 

http://www.58-Shelmerdine-Close.blogspot.com

https://58-shelmerdine-close.blogspot.com/2010/10/act-7.html

https://www.flickr.com/photos/26961618@N06/collections/72157625322684343/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/26961618@N06/albums/72157625582409516/

https://www.karenheald.co.uk/projects-7qadv2

The Pillow Series is a collection of artworks created over several years by Karen Heald and Chris Bird-Jones. Collectively known as Bird-Jones & Heald and based in Wales, UK. The Pillow Series explored dreams, the unconscious and the invisibility of time (physical, spiritual and imaginary) from a feminist art perspective; incorporating contemporary technologies and scientific dialogues. Researching how to make the invisibility of time visible, combining glass, film and sound the artworks questioned what sleep and the body means cross culturally and in different spaces. The textural glass casing houses the moving image further separating the dreamer from the viewer. The Pillow Series has been exhibited in a variety of exhibitions in international galleries including: 

Odoo/Current, Genghis Art Gallery, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 2007https://odoocurrent2007.blogspot.com/2008/08/
https://odoocurrent2007.blogspot.com/2008/08/

Everything will be Fine (Alles Wird Gut), Halle fur Kunst, Luneburg University, Germany, 2007
https://halle-fuer-kunst.de/public/en/publikationen
https://halle-fuer-kunst.de/public/en/publikationen/authors:!Kagan_Sascha

Be our Guest, Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown, Wales, 2013.

Ellen Bell writing for Artist Newletter (AN) about the Be our Guest exhibition at Oriel Davies Gallery states: ‘For the most part the artworks featured in Be Our Guest accentuate the grotesque ‘Little Britain/League of Gentleman-style’ kind of guest house. Our worst fears encapsulated, exaggerated. But amongst all this viscera there is subtlety, particularly in Bird-Jones Heald’s Pillow Series IV, 2013 where a tiny monitor sits amidst a feather-stuffed pillow relaying a film of hands rolling glass chess pieces around on a board. The delicate click of the pawns a gentle acknowledgement of the kind of Groundhog Day tedium of locked-in rainy afternoons’.  https://www.a-n.co.uk/reviews/be-our-guest/
http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/be-our-guest

https://www.karenheald.co.uk/the-pillow-series2

Adain Avion: mobile art space, social sculpture and travelling time capsule. 

Adain Avion is part of the UK-wide London 2012 Festival and is Wales’ major contribution to the Cultural Olympiad, the largest cultural celebration in the history of the modern Olympic and Paralympic Movements. The transformed fuselage of a DC09 aeroplane will migrate across Wales igniting the imagination with an exciting collection of cultural and sporting activity curated by Welsh artist Marc Rees. Over three weeks Adain Avion visits Swansea, Ebbw Vale and Llandudno presenting over 150 different events before ending its journey at the National Eisteddfod of Wales in Llandow, Vale of Glamorgan. Finally the fuselage will visit the National History Museum at St Fagans, Cardiff where the contemporary folk archive of all activities will be deposited via Adain Avion’s black box.

Bird-Jones & Heald exhibited Fragmentary Chronicles at Adain Avion film screening, LOCWS International, at the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, Bird-Jones & Heald, 2012.

https://marcrees.com/projects/adain-avion-2/

https://museum.wales/media/23267/Adain-Avion-Swansea.pdf

https://melintregwynt.co.uk/blogs/projects/adain-avion?srsltid=AfmBOopOyalAkucrPQ20moncR_D6ynQruTGgv-SYOW8II1mvdQClw8zX

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/jul/03/adain-avion-review-cultural-olympiad