Libby Heaney works with quantum materiality to unsettle the conditions through which meaning, time, and perception are ordinarily stabilised. She is recognised as the first artist to use quantum computing as a fully functioning artistic medium, beginning this work in 2019. Her practice moves between glass, watercolour, performance, print, sound, video and computational systems including AI and quantum technologies, treating these not as tools of representation but as sites where coherence can fail.

Rather than using quantum theory as metaphor or for speculative world-building, Heaney engages quantum processes as active constraints that undo linear causality, hierarchical relations and the bounded subject. Drawing on her PhD in quantum information science, she works with phenomena such as superposition, entanglement and non-locality to explore what happens when perception does not fully stabilise, when time does not resolve into sequence, and when experience resists narrative closure.

Her work is shaped by intimate encounters with grief, memory, ecological loss and family, but it does not seek to translate these into resolved experiences. Instead, these materials are held in states of indeterminacy, where subject and object, inner and outer, human and non-human remain entangled without collapsing into representation. Through this approach, Heaney has developed a distinctive visual and conceptual language for what she calls quantum feeling: a way of staying with the limits of sensation itself. Care, grief, magic and politics enter the work  as forces that shape how uncertainty is held rather than represented, how relations endure, and how meaning is allowed to remain unresolved.

Recent works bring together prehistoric cave systems, reflections on the meaning of life, ecological collapse and quantum computation to think across past-present-futures without assuming continuity or progress. Her practice asks how technologies might carry emotional and ethical weight without reducing complexity and how quantum materiality might help us rethink the very conditions under which experience, consciousness and relation become possible.

Born in a working-class family in the West Midlands, Heaney trained as a scientist before turning to art. She holds a PhD in quantum information science from the University of Leeds, with postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore. This scientific training is central to her artistic method, grounding her work in sustained engagement with quantum theory itself rather than illustrative or speculative approaches. Between 2015 and 2019 she held a permanent academic post at the Royal College of Art in London, where she helped shape contemporary dialogues between art, science and emerging technologies.

Heaney’s work has been presented internationally at institutions including HEK, Basel, LAS Art Foundation, Berlin, Somerset House, the V&A Museum, ArtScience Museum, Singapore, CCCB, Barcelona, and Belvedere 21, Vienna, among others. She has received numerous awards including the Lumen Prize and the Falling Walls Art & Science Prize, and is currently developing new commissions with the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich and the British Council in partnership with Museum MACAN, Jakarta.

Across her practice, Heaney asks how quantum materiality can help us rethink the conditions of past-present-future and resist the urge to resolve uncertainty into stable worlds, staying instead with relations that remain shifting, entangled, and unfinished and how this affects human, nature and machine.