Shadowscapes (Emotional Dumping Ground), 2025, realtime interactive quantum multiverse with live webcam feed (via Unity app) with stereo sound, variable time
Shadowscapes (Emotional Dumping Ground), 2025, is part of Heaney’s solo show Shadowscapes: Heaney, JMW Turner and Quantum at Orleans House Gallery 9 Oct 2025 – 1 Mar 2026, featuring three oil paintings by JMW Turner, which Heaney interprets as contemporary psychological landscapes.
The exhibition is part of Tate’s Turner 250 – a year long festival to mark 250 years since the birth of JMW Turner. Heaney worked with Tate Britain curator Nicole Cochrane to select the specific paintings – The Vision of Jacob’s (?) Ladder, c. 1830, The Hero of a Hundred Fights, c. 1800-10, reworked 1847 and Rocky Bay with Figures c. 1827-30.
Drawing on CG Jung’s concept of shadow (the parts of us we deem unacceptable and unconsciously suppress) and quantum physics (the invisible fluidity at the microscopic heart of all matter), Heaney invites the audiences to think about the invisible forces that shape our inner and outer worlds.
Shadow work is important as when we do not recognise and integrate our disowned parts, we often project them onto others and nature, causing polarisation.
In Shadowscapes (Emotional Dumping Ground) audiences encounter, interact with and appear in a layered quantum multiverse filled with various ’emotional’ landscapes. For Heaney, our unruly emotions are quantum-like: a layered, contradicting field of potential.
Audiences witness glimpses of black towering mountains, twisted thorns, moonlit barren vistas, littered turbulent rivers, pink haze, green haze, degraded human-made structures, dank caves, pale sludge, unearthly fauna and more. These are layered over Heaney’s open mouth, her blood red lips parted, suggesting landscapes that are both internal and external, sensual and chaste, personal and universal. The audience may experience our subconscious drives and desires as part of nature.
The layers move and continually come into different relations with each other following Heaney’s self-written quantum computing code (using IBM’s publicly available quantum computers via the cloud) embedded into Unity games engine. This continues Heaney’s exploration of the aesthetics of quantum materiality and results in her signature shapeshifting, blurry, layered quantum aesthetic. The audience experience a disorienting, non-linear journey, inviting them to think about a unboundaried, unstable self, deeply entangled with nature and technology.
The imagery in the piece is inspired by Heaney’s engagement with the Turner paintings. As part of her process, she used automatic drawing, painting, writing, coding and movement practices to dive into and uncover the hidden depths of the Turner painting’s. These then sparked explorations of her own shadow – her own blindspots as well as shadow dynamics in Heaney’s own family.
Shadowscapes (Emotional Dumping Ground) blurs the boundaries between painting and interactive digital art, object and subject. The work interacts with the audience through a webcam and AI facial recognition. When people move in front of the webcam, the moving images become more like a painting. Audiences see the footage stop and they hear the score becomes quieter as a poetic spoken narrative plays, mirroring quantum collapse of all possibilities to one under observation.
The audience also sees a faint digital capture of themselves amongst the work’s layers. When the audience member moves away, the speed and movement of Shadowscapes (Emotional Dumping Ground) returns to “normal” and it loops at its regular pace, highlighting how the act of looking and entangling disrupts the state of the world.
Shadowscapes (Emotional Dumping Ground) was accompanied by a site specific soft-sculptural seat encouraging audience members to linger, look and listen. The seat takes the form of a hybrid, in various shades of brown, it resembles branches or tentacles and the fabric is in various shades of brown referencing the colours in the paintings by Turner, as well as galleries walls and floors. White skin coloured silicone casts of Heaney’s hand with long black nails protrude from some of the branches.
Combined with an atmospheric and sometimes pulsating soundscape, Shadowscapes (Emotional Dumping Ground) invites audiences to feel an emotional resonance within themselves and with nature
Overall, Shadowscapes (Emotional Dumping Ground) invites audiences to think about how we project or ‘dump’ our unprocessed emotions onto others as well as nature; how our subconscious minds are wild so therefore close to nature and how future quantum technologies may highlight the deep interconnectedness between seemingly unconnected realities.
