Dr Libby Heaney is a working class, award winning artist with a PhD and professional background in Quantum Science. She is the first artist to work with quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium.
Heaney’s practice draws on the inherently shapeshifting & non-binary concepts and non-linear temporalities of quantum physics as resistance against anthropocentric futures.
She combines diverse media such as installations, performance, virtual reality, video games, moving image, watercolour, glass and public sculpture with cutting-edge technologies like AI and quantum computing. Together these create a dream-like aesthetic, imagining visceral posthuman, postcapitalist dimensions and asking big philosophical questions about existence & the nature of reality, while remaining intimate and embodied.
Quantum inspired monsters, hybrids, slime and other fluid shapeshifting forms are recurring motifs, entangling personal narratives, memories & emotional landscapes with the impact of the exterior realm, particularly the natural world.
Ooze becomes a symbol of potentiality, transformation and the blurred boundaries between the human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, life and death.
Spanning the organic, the mechanical and the human, Heaney’s practice continuously seeks to expand the possibilities of the individual and the collective through the irrational magic of quantum, while critically queering capitalist uses of technology.
Solo exhibitions include Quantum Soup, HEK, Basel; Heartbreak & Magic, Somerset House, London and Ent-, LAS Art Foundation, Berlin, among others.
In 2024 her first artistic monograph was published by Hatje Cantz and she participated in Frieze Sculpture, London.
As a pioneer in the field of quantum and art, Heaney is frequently called to deliver keynotes and speak on panels around the world such as at MUTEK FORUM, Montreal; Museum of Moving Image, New York City; Gwangju Biennale Symposium, Gwangju; London Sculpture Week, London and Sonar+D, Barcelona.
In 2025, Heaney will hold a solo show at Orlean House Gallery, London which will include works by J M W Turner as part of Turner 250 and the UNESCO Year of Quantum Science and Technology.
Background
Heaney holds an MSci in Physics from Imperial College London and a PhD in Quantum Information Science from the University of Leeds.
She worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore, publishing around 20 papers in international peer reviewed journals.
She was also the recipient of the HSBC and Institute of Physics, Very Early Career Woman in Physics award.
Fulflilling her childhood dream of becoming an artist, Heaney graduated from Central St. Martins, University of the Arts London in 2015.
She then held a permanent faculty position at the Royal College of Art, London.
Heaney has received numerous commissions and grants including from HTC Vive Arts; Mozilla Foundation (Creative Media Award); Sky Arts; British Council and Arts Council England, among others.
From 2017 to 2024, she was a resident of the prestigious Somerset House Studios, London and in 2022, Heaney won the Lumen Prize, Falling Walls Art & Science award and a STARTS Prize nominati