Projects
Becoming
Becoming
Becoming is an interactive prototype being developed at the Virtual Production Studio, Belfast Media Lab. The work explores matrescence, the profound and often ineffable transformation of becoming a mother, through sound, sculpture, interactive and large-scale moving image.
Created by artist Helena Hamilton, in collaboration with Janie Doherty (artist, doula, massage therapist) and Aisling McGeown (poet, filmmaker), the project is informed by both their own lived experiences and qualitative research with mothers across generations, from early parenthood to grandmothers.
At its centre is a sculptural core: a steel bath transformed into a resonant speaker. Tactile transducers make the bath vibrate audibly and physically, while children’s toys placed in and around it tip, fall and rattle against the steel, creating sharp, percussive sounds that carry both playfulness and fragility. When touched, the bath’s surface vibrations can be felt directly, offering audiences a tactile encounter with sound.
This sculptural environment is enveloped by a hybrid sound field combining loudspeakers, open-back headphones, and the bath itself as a resonant speaker. Moving images on a large-scale LED wall transform the intimate into the monumental, magnifying gestures of care and daily life into a shared, collective experience.
Open-back headphones deliver spoken-word poetry drawn from the research, so that each participant carries an intimate, personal strand of the work. Each poem currently loops as a self-contained listening experience, and we are experimenting with how these loops might alter depending on participants’ proximity to one another. Building on a ‘hybrid listening system’ developed at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (QUB), this research explores how poems can form a shifting constellation of voices that responds to audience movement, whilst also surrounding each listener in a personal sound cocoon. This interplay of individual listening and collective interaction evokes how themes of isolation, connection, resilience and contradiction are lived and shared across maternal experience.
Experiment
£20,000
Aims of the Project
The project aims to make matrescence, a term still unfamiliar to many, more visible and widely understood. It seeks to explore the ineffability of this transformation through artistic means: spatial sound, tactile haptic objects, and interactive processes that resist simple explanation. In Becoming, sound is treated as a medium that can create a deeply personal and resonant listening experience, even while situated within a collective environment.
The work is also driven by the eclectic skills of its collaborators: artist Helena Hamilton’s practice in sound, sculpture and immersive media; Janie Doherty’s skills as a movement artist, doula and massage therapist; and Aisling McGeown’s practice as a poet and filmmaker. Alongside qualitative research with mothers across generations, these diverse skills shape the project’s development into an authentic experience that resonates with a wide range of audiences. At the same time, the project seeks to push the boundaries of how immersive art can hold, translate, and share complex lived experiences.
Meet the artists
Helena Hamilton
Lead artist
she/her
I am an artist working at the intersections of visual art, sound, and digital interaction.Their practice explores dynamic relationships between sound, image, and site, bridging the digital and physical to create experiences that evoke meaning rather than impose it.
At its core is a quiet yet deliberate politics—a fascination with the overlooked: the hum of fluorescent tubes, the crease of crumpled paper, or the repetitive sound of their child’s toy. Grounded in observation and investigation, their work draws from everyday life to create open-ended encounters that invite reflection on the extraordinary within the ordinary.
Janie Doherty
Choreographer
Janie Doherty is a dancer, choreographer, artist, mother and doula. Recent projects include ‘Mother Tongue’ at the MAC, Belfast (26 April – 21 July 2024), ‘The Night Draws Near’ at the Ulster Museum, Belfast (August 2023), ‘Politics of Comfort’ at the Centre of Contemporary Art, Derry (2019).Janie Doherty is a movement based artist, massage therapist, performer mother and doula. After graduating with a first class honors in dance, Janie has been working in Northern Ireland as a community facilitator and performer. Janie is interested in helping people connect to an embodied state of being through movement, story-telling and performance. She has over 15 years experience working in the community as a dance artist and is currently collaborating with womens centres to support new mothers by reflecting on our lived experience in an embodied and artistic way.
Aisling McGeown
Filmmaker
Aisling is a filmmaker with over 10 years of experience in media and broadcasting. Aside from making films for broadcast and online over the years her career has also been focused around community filmmaking. She has worked closely with youth to give voice to complex social and community issues, including teenage motherhood. This work has combines lived experience with in-depth research and consultation with her paticipants to create deeply personal and authentic stories that have received various cinematic nominations. Creatively and technically driven Aisling is committed to storytelling that fosters meaningful dialogue and understanding. Alongside filmmaking , she is a poet writing in both English and Irish, with poems reflecting on motherhood and life in Belfast published in multiple community pamphlets.
