Fiona Brehony
Fiona Brehony, Water Symphony 3
GAR Environmental/Installation Artist: Fiona Sinéad Brehony
September 2026
The Environmental/Installation artist (E/IA) is selected via jury and receives a stipend for the month-long residency, typically held in September. Artists are encouraged to work outdoors and develop their ideas and concepts pertaining to the region concurrently working on a “site-specific” installation located at the Ocean Alliance Center on Rocky Neck. This residency has made art both visible and accessible to the public. Artists are encouraged to engage the public and draw attention to questions and challenges posed by environmental policies, politics, and/or social change.
Fiona Sinéad Brehony is a Manchester-based artist and writer working across moving image, sound, and performance, collaborating across disciplines with scientists, composers, historians, and communities to make work that is poetic and inquisitive, alive to the constraints places hold and the histories that might be liberated from them. Her practice is rooted in rivers and waterways, exploring the oral histories, material flows, and community connections that bind body, city, and water together, asking whose knowledge matters when places transform.
She is an AHRC-funded doctoral candidate exploring the River Irk in North Manchester as a living site of cultural heritage, and is currently in residence with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Oslo, developing Water Symphony, a series of short audiovisual works following the city's fjord, rivers, and waterways as a medium through which questions of urban justice can be revealed. Water Symphony grows from Liquid History, her ongoing practice of workshops and soundwalks where rivers become living archives of social and ecological memory. It is this understanding of water as living archive, carrier of community memory, ecological history, and social injustice, that the Ocean Alliance residency invites her to extend from the scale of the urban river to the ocean.
The residency offers an opportunity to explore Gloucester Harbor through Richard White's concept of the organic machine, simultaneously a natural system and human infrastructure, yet also something so vast and distributed it exceeds our ability to fully grasp it. She will engage in acts of listening, watching and writing to see what emerges, inviting participants in for gatherings where ideas can transform collectively. Working with Ocean Alliance's whale song archives, she hopes to develop poetic work that explores ocean presence, waters shared with whales, where freshwater meets salt and interaction shifts from intimate to incomprehensible.
Her work has been commissioned by the Whitworth Art Gallery, the University of Oxford, PRiSM at the Royal Northern College of Music, and Creswell Crags Museum, and supported by Arts Council England, the Royal Geographical Society, the Eaton Fund, and AHRC Doctoral Funding (2023-2027).
Related Link
Castlefield Gallery - Artists and Sustainability Spotlight
The Conversation - How artists are tracking environmental change through poetry, film and sound