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Wood Anemone, by Anna
Anna King - Photo credit: Julia Dunin
Dr. Anna King (PhD, MA, BA) is a published author, multidisciplinary artist and ethnographer living in Ireland. Working through a contemplative lens, she explores the interplay between memory, place, and hidden histories through poetic prose, visual storytelling, photography and experimental layering.
Anna’s practice weaves together research, intuitive exploration, and creative reflection:
“I am particularly drawn to how memory settles into place and season, held within natural rhythms and revealed as shifting echoes over time.”
Practice & Approach
Since completing her PhD, Anna has developed a series of unique participatory contemplative art practices grounded in deep listening to landscape, seasonal transitions, and timeless stories woven into the fabric of place.
Selected Projects, 2026
ARRIVAL, Ballindoon House, Sligo. Artist Residency.
ARRIVAL explores the experience of approaching and encountering a historic landscape through visual art, poetic prose, soundscapes and mapping.
Developed through site-responsive research and a field trip with students from St. Nathy’s College, the project unfolds through walking, observation and creative response.
The residency culminates in a public event and exhibition at Edmondstown House, as part of the Ballinderreen Arts Festival.
Funded by the (NIAH) National Built Heritage Service and The Ballaghaderreen Arts Festival. April–September, 2026
The Well Gathering
The Well Gathering is a public art and community engagement project by Anna King and Dominic Keogh, developed in response to the Plots and Spring Well in Ballaghaderreen. Drawing on the site’s storied past, the work explores gathering as both memory and practice through sculpture, research and process.
Commissioned as part of the Plots Town Park development, the project is funded through the Rural Regeneration and Development Fund, in partnership with Roscommon County Council and Creative Places Ballaghaderreen. 2026.
The Lazy Wall
The Lazy Wall: Reimagining the Plots as a Shared, Living Landscape is a participatory art project by Anna King, funded by Creative Ireland.
The project draws on the history of The Plots, Duff’s Well & the old creamery, where daily life was shaped through shared labour, social exchange and cooperation.
Inspired by the Lazy Wall, where farmers gathered as they waited to weigh their milk, the project reflects on these everyday acts of coming together as spaces of connection, storytelling and collective experience.
Past Projects
The Cherry Blossom Tales
A creative nonfiction project that brings the past to life through storytelling, art, folklore, and community recollections. Funded by Roscommon County Council Creative Ireland Programme 2025, this initiative involved a series of dynamic workshops with students at St. Nathy’s College, culminating in an exhibition during the Ballaghaderreen Arts Festival, 2025.
PlaceWays
During Anna’s Creative Places Ballaghaderreen Artist Research Residency (2023 - December 2024), she developed PlaceWays, a project exploring how places are lived in, known and remembered. Funded by the Arts Council and Roscommon County Council.
Book, published in 2022, by Austin Macauley Publishers.
Anna is co-author of Rekindling the Fire: Food & the Journey of Life with Dr. Martin Ruffley.
Doctorate in Philosophy from University of Galway
2009-2014: PhD (Ethnography and Arts-Based Methodologies).
Title: An Alternative Gathering: Public Space and Shared Agency in the Lived Experience of Multicultural Ireland. Anna’s research was awarded a prestigious three-year full-time Irish Research Council Scholarship.
LifeWays
Current Creative Project
LifeWays is a contemplative art practice grounded in deep listening to landscape, seasonal rhythms, and ecological time. This work weaves photography, moving image, poetic prose and sound to investigate how human experience settles into place, revealing subtle traces within the natural world.
Evolving from the foundations laid in 'The Cherry Blossom Tales', LifeWays traces memory as it moves through landscape and season - the visible and unseen patterns that carry experience across time and terrain.
Catching the whisper of the unseen, my poetry listens to the echo of beauty hidden in scarred landscapes and forgotten ties.