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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.
Learn more about my creative practice
Selection of Work
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 Project:
LifeWays is a contemplative art practice exploring how memory moves over time through landscape and season. Rooted in attentive presence, this work weaves sensory storytelling, poetic image-making and sound with a deep inquiry into belonging, place and ecological remembrance.
Evolving from the foundations laid in ‘The Cherry Blossom Tales’, this project traces the LifeWays, visible and unseen, that carry experience across time and terrain.
It invites attunement to what lingers just beneath the surface: the natural signatures of a world remembering the interconnected layers of belonging that sustain all of life.
Catching the whisper of the unseen, my poetry listens to the echo of beauty hidden in scarred landscapes and forgotten ties.