Dr Libby Heaney is an award winning artist with a PhD & professional research background in Quantum Information Science. She is widely known as the first artist to work with quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium. 

Heaney’s practice explores inherently magical, queer, non-local and hybrid concepts from quantum science to disrupt binary categories and hierarchies and foster radical interconnectedness.

Her works combine diverse mediums such as performance, moving image, glass and watercolour with cutting-edge technologies including machine learning, game engines and quantum computing, entangling interior landscapes with the impact of the exterior realm.

Quantum science is a theory of the microscopic material world, proposing that reality is infinitely more complex than what appears.  According to this theory, everything exists simultaneously in all possible states as a vast, layered multiverse.

Crucially Heaney’s works takes quantum’s non-binary layering as a metaphor to continuously expand the possibilities of the individual and the collective, transcending capitalist uses of technology.

Through the ambivalent mechanisms and blurry logic of quantum, Heaney creates new non-linear modes of affective storytelling, weaving fact and fiction and embracing both narrative and intuitive visceral embodied experiences.

Slime is a reoccuring motif in Heaney’s work, characterizing the unstable nature of all things and the self. Slime becomes a symbol of potentiality, transformation and the blurred boundaries between the animate and inanimate, between life and death.

Overlapping themes include explorations of quantum-hybrid human and non-human bodies as in Ent- and slimeQrawl; the non-binary nature of existence and self as depicted in Heartbreak and Magic and Never Too Much and technology’s impact on the environment and possible alternatives as investigated in Q is for Climate (?) and Wild Data. 

Background

As a scientist Heaney worked at the University of Oxford and National University of Singapore, publishing around 20 papers in international peer reviewed journals.

She was the recipient of the HSBC and Institute of Physics, Very Early Career Woman in Physics award. In 2015 Heaney graduated from Central St. Martins, London and held a faculty position at the Royal College of Art, London from 2016 to 2019.

Since then, Heaney has exhibited at major institutions and museums in the UK and internationally such as HEK, Basel; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Tate Modern, London; V&A Museum, London and the Art Encounters Biennial, Timișoara.

Her significant solo exhibitions and performances include Quantum Soup, HEK, Basel; Heartbreak and Magic, Somerset House, London; Ent-, LAS Art Foundation, Berlin; The Evolution of Ent-: QX, arebyte Gallery, London; The Whole Earth Chanting, Sonar Festival, Barcelona; and CASCADE, Southbank Centre, London.

Heaney has received numerous commissions and grants including from HTC Vive Arts; Mozilla Foundation (Creative Media Award); Sky Arts and Arts Council England, among others. 

From 2017 to 2024 she was a resident of the prestigious Somerset House Studios in London and in 2022, Heaney won the Lumen Prize, Falling Walls Art & Science award and a STARTS Prize nomination.