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 explores the inherently non-binary and hybrid concepts and non-linear temporalities of quantum physics.
She combines diverse media such as virtual reality, video games, moving image, watercolour, glass and most recently public sculpture with cutting-edge technologies like AI and quantum computing.
Together these create a dream-like aesthetic, asking big philosophical questions about existence & the nature of reality while remaining very human, intimate and embodied.
Quantum inspired monsters, hybrids, slime and other fluid forms are recurring motifs, entangling personal narratives and emotional landscapes with the impact of the exterior realm.
Ooze becomes a symbol of potentiality, transformation and the blurred boundaries between the 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 the Gwangju Biennale Symposium, London Sculpture Week 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, 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 held a permanent faculty position at the Royal College of Art, London from 2016 to 2019.
Since then, 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, London and in 2022, Heaney won the Lumen Prize, Falling Walls Art & Science award and a STARTS Prize nomination.