This June–July, Gail Mahon joins Void Art Centre × Ampersand Foundation as Artist-in-Residence in Derbyshire, near the Peak District, developing Future Foresting: EcoSensing Bioar(t)chae(c)ologies. During the residency, she will expand on her creative autoethnographic study to explore human–forest relations by mapping interconnections to walking, clay, soils, and bone minerals, creating somatic sculptures and experimental, movement-based artefacts.
Gail will extend her research from Irish Mesolithic sites at Mount Sandel in Northern Ireland to British sites at York, including Star Carr, and engage with interdisciplinary arts and health sciences at Loughborough University, weaving together fieldwork, creative reflection, and embodied practice. The residency also provides time to connect deeply with the Peak District landscape, forming elements of research assembled as part somatic poetry, part critical essay, and part call to action; allowing her work to evolve organically through movement, material inquiry, and forest immersion.
Gail Mahon is an ecosomatic artist and practice-based PhD researcher at Ulster University, based near Derry City, working across ceramics, movement, and biological arts. Her practice positions the body as a responsive ecological site, exploring plasticity and porosity through interactions with bone mineralogy, clay, and environmental systems as interrelated material-culture languages.
Through installation, image-making, and socially engaged processes, Mahon investigates the entanglement of climate, landscape, and embodied experience. Her work unfolds through collaborative and site-responsive methodologies, including immersive workshops that prioritise proprioceptive readings of landscape as modes of trust, risk, care, and sensory exchange.
Mahon is a recipient of the Northern Bridge Doctoral Scholarship (AHRC), supporting transdisciplinary research that brings together bioengineering, bioarchaeology, and sports science in collaboration with partners at Durham University. She holds an MA in Ceramics & Glass from the Royal College of Art and has exhibited across the UK, Ireland, and internationally, including Italy and China.
She is the founder of The Clay Gymnasium (TCG), an evolving social studio-lab that integrates movement culture, material practice, and ecological health. Her work traces shifting relationships among embodiment, matter, and the environment, situating transformation as both an intimate and a planetary condition.
