Libby Heaney

Libby Heaney is an award-winning artist with a PhD in quantum information science. Her practice moves between glass, watercolour, performance, print, sound, video and computational systems, including AI and quantum technologies; treated not as tools of representation, but as sites where meaning is made anew.

Through a dreamlike aesthetic, Libby's work asks what happens when images and copying are impossible, and how we make meaning through embodiment and feeling instead. This has led her to develop a distinctive visual and conceptual language she calls quantum feeling; where care, belonging, magic and politics enter the work through continuously unfolding, unresolved uncertainties.

Rather than reaching for off-the-shelf AI tools, Libby builds her own machine learning systems, training her own GANs on text, images or sound. As she puts it, where tools like ChatGPT or Dall-E act like a mirror with no change, she programs her systems to blend and weave together new forms, using AI to sharpen and multiply her craft, not replace it.

Libby trained as a scientist before turning to art, holding a PhD in quantum information science from the University of Leeds, with postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore. Between 2015 and 2019 she held a permanent academic post at the Royal College of Art, shaping contemporary dialogue between art, science and emerging technology, work she continues through her practice and talks today.

Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Museum of the Moving Image (New York), HEK (Basel), LAS Art Foundation (Berlin), Somerset House (London), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), Sonar Festival (Barcelona) and Orleans House Gallery (London), among others. She has received the Lumen Prize and the Falling Walls Art & Science Prize (both 2022) and Arts Council England Project Grants, and is currently developing new commissions with the British Council in partnership with Museum MACAN, Jakarta.