The Team
Tara Baoth Mooney
Soundscape, music composition, original field recordings, creative writing and illustrations. Workshop development & outreach, grant writing, personal story contribution, garment embroidery & design direction, and chair project management.
Maf’J Alvarez
Creative direction, VR technical development and production of VR experience in Unity3D. Environment design, 3D modeling and animation. Field research & photogrammetry capture. Storyboarding, UX Interaction design and user testing.
Camille Baker
Concept and ideation, research grant writing, community outreach, workshop development, narrative framework, content development and story editing, staging and promotion, and overall project production.
Sophie Skach
Garment design, wearable prototyping, pattern design, embroidery and overall wearable construction
Paul Hayes
Haptic design, bespoke peripheral development and electronics.
Contributors
Leo Scarff – Chair Design & Construction.
Dann Eammons & Marc Coleman – Photo & Video Documentation, Trailer Editing.
Lee Paul Heron – Web Design, Build & Hosting.
Special Thanks
Rian Trench – Drone Photographer.
Diarmuid Mac Diarmada – Sound Mastering.
Stuart Lawn – Creative Leitrim Partner.
Andy Baker – Additional Programming Support.
Dessie & Mary Carroway – The Seabarn.
^ Collective, Manorhamilton – Studio Space.
Sorcha Fox – Workshops.
And finally, thanks especially to all the amazing story contributions by Breast Cancer survivors, patients and their families, without whom the Mammary Mountain project would not have been possible.
Tara Baoth Mooney
Tara Baoth Mooney is an interdisciplinary artist whose work responds to events past and present that explore lived experience and the inter-relationship of people with daily ritual, plants, nonhuman life forms and objects within their respective ecologies and practice.
Her work encompasses sound, performance, drawing, and video and is often site-specific, meandering between foundations of meaning-making in context, where self and meaning sit in situation or place, and the interruption of self and unmaking of meaning through destruction of place.
Mooney has an ongoing interest in the compulsion for people to make meaning through ritual and practices such as telling stories, singing, keeping and caring for cherished objects etc.
Her 2009 project Diary Of Our Daily Threads, explored loss and grief through textiles, stories and sound. Recently, she completed time as artist-in-residence at the Hawkswell Sligo, where she was exploring women’s work and fowl rearing practices using the egg as a subversive womens currency.
This project was supported by The Arts Council Agility Award and The Hawkswell Theatre. It began with recordings of women telling their stories and will be staged as a music and site specific movement piece in Aug 2024.
She is a member of t”^” The rural based, art collective in Manorhamilton Co. Leitrim and is a studio holder at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre. Tara works in collaboration with The Clumsy Giantess, a shadow persona that enables her to engage with her arts practice in a way that offers new perspectives in how to engage with the world around her.
In 2021 she completed an art-based research PhD which focused on the relationship between people, lived experience, music and garments within an eco-psychosocial framework. Her work has brought her from performing a puppet character with the Jim Henson Studio in New York, to the heart of sustainable fashion and textiles in China, Bangladesh and India. Tara has just completed a year-long Creative Exchange at The Leitrim Sculpture Centre.
Maf’j Alvarez
Maf’j Alvarez is a digital media artist and creative technologist living in Brighton, UK.
Her work focuses on ecology, cultural and gender diversity in relation to open access to technology. She also works as a user experience designer on large-scale digital transformation projects for government services.
Maf’j has a BA in Interactive Arts from Manchester Metropolitan University (1998) and an MA in Digital Media Arts from Brighton University and Lighthouse (2015).
She has been a resident artist at Fusebox Brighton since 2017, where she began working with virtual reality using Unity3d. She has helped other women learn VR through hack days, mentoring, talks, and collaborations.
Past work includes the interactive installation “Stroke,” which was shortlisted for funding by the Wellcome Trust’s SciArt initiative and shown at ISEA (International Symposium of Electronic Arts). Also “Softworld,” an interactive modular textile installation that encourages collaboration, which was shown at The Lowry.
Recent work includes the VR experience INTER/her with artist Camille Baker on reproductive system illness, and Eva Quantica, commissioned by National Gallery X and shown at the Brighton Festival.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Maf’j founded Inkibit Immersive, which aims to support women and other marginalized immersive tech creatives to democratize technology for the cultural and arts sector. She runs workshops, talks, hack-jams, and mentoring sessions, and participates in programs focused on early stage prototyping in immersive arts.
Camille Baker
Camille Baker is an artist-performer / researcher / curator within various art forms. These include immersive experiences, participatory performance, interactive art, mobile media art, tech fashion / soft circuits / DIY electronics, responsive interfaces and environments, and emerging media curating.
A maker of participatory performance and immersive artwork, Camille develops methods to explore expressive non-verbal modes of communication, extended embodiment and presence in the real, in mixed reality and interactive art contexts, using XR, haptics, e-textiles, wearable devices and mobile media.
Camille is a Senior Tutor for the Digital Direction Masters Programme at the Royal College of Art, and a Professor of Interactive & Immersive Arts.
Her current touring artwork is INTER/her: An Intimate Journey Inside the Female Body which was LUMEN Prize 2021 shortlisted. She was also co-creator in a performance residency project “Intangible Threshold” in 2020 which was presented at the DRHA 2022 at Kingston University.
Her long-time collaboration with Dr Kate Sicchio resulted in many presentations, papers, talks and performances, including Hacking the Body 2.0, using wearable technology and e-textiles in dance and participatory performance .
She also co-ran the meetup group e-stitches since 2014 with smart / e-textile artists and designers, where participants share their practice and facilitate workshops of new techniques and innovations,.
Paul Hayes
Paul Hayes is a renouned creative programme, game maker, VR and interactive installation developer, with over 150 repositories on GitHub.
A creator of physical installations and lover of escape room puzzles. Paul is currently focusing on the intricacies of escape room development.
Sophie Skach
Sophie Skach is a fashion designer and researcher based in London.
Having studied menswear and knitwear design technology, as well as mathematics in Austria (Modeschule Wien Hetzendorf, TU Wien, Kunstuniversitaet Linz) and the UK (London College of Fashion), she has presented her collections on international catwalks and has closely collaborated with the textile industry.
As a designer and consultant, she worked with large companies (e.g Swarovski), as well as for fashion start-ups around Europe (e.g. Son Of A Tailor, aéthérée).
Since 2015, Sophie has been pursuing a PhD at Queen Mary University of London as part of the Media & Arts Technology Centre for Doctoral Training.
Her interdisciplinary research combines her experience in fashion, textiles and tailoring with digital media, wearable technology and behavioural studies.
Both, in the academic environment and public platforms in design and fashion, Sophie showcases her works to engage and stimulate a discourse about the role and potential of fashion in wearable technology, establishing e-textiles as a new modality for social computing.