Libby Heaney works with quantum materiality to dissolve the linear logics that structure Western thought. She is known as the first artist globally to use quantum computing as a fully functioning artistic medium, beginning this work in 2019. Her practice moves fluidly between glass, watercolour, performance and print, and digital media including video, sound, computer games, AI and quantum technologies. Through intimate and personal experiences with grief, memory, emotion, nature and family, her work invites audiences to gently reckon with universal questions about the nature of existence, drawing on magic, spirituality and embodied knowledges.

Alongside using quantum as a medium, Heaney also uses it as a prism that destabilises time, representation, hierarchy and the bounded self. Her works create horizontal entanglements between human, nature and machine. Drawing from her PhD in quantum information science, she treats quantum processes as active media that show us, for instance, what a quantum non linear time looks like, what it might feel like to enter the multiverse or how it could be possible to think like the climate itself.

Heaney’s practice reimagines perception and consciousness through non human and non causal quantum phenomena such as superposition, entanglement and non locality. These become tools for rethinking the psychological, ecological and technological interconnections that shape contemporary life. Over the last seven years she has pioneered a visual and conceptual language for what she calls quantum feeling. This invites viewers to sense the world beyond the constraints of classical consciousness, Western binaries, sequencing and representation.

Her current and recent works bring together prehistoric cave systems, reflections on the meaning of life, ecological collapse and quantum computation to help us experience past-present-futures that honour magic, multiplicity and connection rather than surveillance and control. While she is highly critical of the extractive capitalist uses of technologies, Heaney’s work by reflecting on grief and personal memory, queers these systems by asking how technologies can carry emotional weight without reducing the complexity of human experience.

Born in a working class family in the West Midlands in the United Kingdom, Heaney trained as a scientist before turning to art. She holds a PhD in quantum information science from the University of Leeds and held post doctoral fellowships at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore. This scientific background is central to her artistic method and underpins her technical and conceptual experiments with quantum processes.

Heaney has become a leading figure in the field of quantum art and is recognised for pioneering the use of quantum computing as a generative medium. Her work has been presented in the UK and internationally at institutions including Museum of Moving Image, New York; Sonar Festival, Barcelona; MAHA Art Center, Beijing; CCCB, Barcelona; V&A Museum, London; Max Ernst Museum, Bruehl; Museum Giersch, Frankfurt; The Lowry, Manchester; Belvedere 21, Vienna; ArtScience Museum, Singapore among others. 

Heaney has held major solo shows at HEK Basel, LAS Art Foundation in Berlin and Somerset House in London where her immersive quantum worlds, multichannel installations and hybrid material works have been presented at institutional scale. Her expansive solo show Shadowscapes at Orleans House Gallery, London brings together paintings by JMW Turner paintings with Heaney’s digital-quantum multiverses and watercolours. 

Her public sculpture Ent- (non-earthly delights) was exhibited at Frieze Sculpture, further extending her practice into urban and outdoor contexts. Her works are included in significant private and foundation collections such as LAS Art Foundation, the Zabludowicz Collection and 0x Collection, among others. 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.

She has participated in Biennials and given keynotes across the world. In 2022 she won the Lumen Prize, the Falling Walls art-science prize and a STARTS Prize nomination. She is currently developing new commissions with the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich and the British Council in partnership with Museum MACAN in Jakarta.

Across all her work Heaney asks how quantum materiality can help us rethink the conditions of past-present-future and sense ourselves as deeply connected to nature and machine as part of a wider field of relations that are always shifting, entangled and alive. Her practice has become a key reference point in the emerging field of quantum and art and her work continues to expand the possibilities of how contemporary art can engage with science, technology and embodied experiences.