Artist Statement

I am a writer and artist working with text, voice, sound and actions. Originally from Ireland, I now live and works in South West England. My work uses constraints, structures, and other strategies to question category and genre divisions including around identity and agency. I make solo and collaborative performance works that use language, gesture, and digital interfaces to examine how individuals are shaped by cultural and social forces. Works look at the performer’s body as policed by economic, political and cultural narratives, at how ‘voice’ functions to place someone, and at how the language can perpetuate inequalities. Projects have explored the capacity, meaning and culture of the human voice, alongside the presentation and performance of self.

In recent live works I have performed vocalisations of material fed to me via headphones, generated live using chance operations on text data. I have developed a number of pieces that depend on interaction with the audience, and small scale activity extended over hours or days. I have worked with groups to develop scores through discussion and collaboration, and have performed site-responsive works that engage the audience as both an element of the site and as potential participants. In collaborative works I have worked with musicians and choreographers to investigate the boundaries of our contiguous artforms, working with sound and movement, noise and breath, to engage questions of communication, expression and the body.

Professional Biography

Following a first degree in Fine Art – Sculpture (1985), Mark Leahy worked as a practicing artist, showing work in two-person and group exhibitions in Ireland, and has works in private and public collections there. He was an early member of the artists co-op All + 10 Sorts in Limerick, and took on the role of studio and gallery manager there 1987-1988. He returned to education to pursue a degree in English at University College Dublin, and went on to complete an MA by research on the work of playwright George Fitzmaurice (1994). This research included directing productions of two of Fitzmaurice’s works.

While teaching part-time at UCD and working on The Thomas MacGreevy Archive, a humanities computing research project, he and three colleagues set up a production company, Bright Boy, to produce site-specific theatre works. Their work included Dubl’n Babble’on, a promenade event at Newman House, Dublin, celebrating the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett (1995).

The receipt of a research scholarship in American Studies at Leeds University allowed him to pursue PhD research on contemporary American poetry, with particular attention to reading and the reader (1996-1999). This research led to a renewed interest in the intersection of visual and verbal art works and resulted in the joint curation of a day of workshops and papers with accompanying exhibition titled Verbal inter Visual in Birkbeck College and at Central St Martin’s, London (2001).

This work and ongoing freelance work as a design assistant on a number of theatre or performance projects, led to a sustained period of work at Artsadmin in London, as a project manager on work for Bobby Baker and Station House Opera (2001-2003). In parallel with this were three years as visiting lecturer in the Visual Culture and Media Department at the University of Middlesex (2001-2004). This work included development of a module in Writing for Design and Art Students, and engagement with a range of contemporary art and design practices.

He was employed as a Lecturer in Writing at Dartington College of Arts in September 2003, and was appointed Director of Writing there in August 2005. He moved to become MA Programme Leader at Dartington in October 2007, and continued in that role until October 2010 when Dartington was merged with Falmouth University. He taught part-time at Falmouth University on Undergraduate modules in Performance and Creative Writing, and continues to supervise PhD students there.

Since 2014 he has worked part-time at the University of Plymouth, teaching at BA and MA level on courses in Fine Art, Performance, and Creative Writing, and supervising PhD projects. He continues to examine at postgraduate and PhD level, to peer review articles and to present at academic conferences. He was a founding director of art dot earth CIC (2016-2022), a Devon-based organisation supporting arts practice in the area of nature environment and ecology; he is on the board of Soundart Radio, a community arts radio station based at Dartington in Devon; and he is Chair of the Board of Trustees for Take a Part CIO, a national charity that develops activity in socially engaged art practice. He is a co-director of CAMP Membership CIC, a member-led platform for artists in Devon and Cornwall.

Mark Leahy continues his writing and performance practice and is involved in research in the area of poetics, theorisation and practices of voice and voicing, and in critical or theoretical investigations around poetry, art, visual culture and their intersections.