Jessica Foley is a poet from Offaly, living and working, in North Dublin City. Her multimodal practice draws upon visual and conceptual art, education and ecology, and histories and practices of communication. Her work is informed by conceptual and installation art, and by experimental practices in art, film-making and writing, and socio-technical research in telecommunications. Her writing and research emerges through imaginative call and response, with people and place, through processes of deep listening, slow looking, embodied improvisation and play.
Alongside writing and teaching, Jessica’s practice choreographs conversational frameworks to support people meeting, in difference, around a specific concern or topic. These bespoke sessions support the intersection of listening, writing, and reading practices that invite memory and imagination, observations and assumptions to come into critical relief through collective attention. Past examples include Engineering Fictions (2013-present) and Stranger Fictions (2016-2018). These bespoke and curated gatherings with small groups, support trans- and para-disciplinary imagination, conversation and reflection through constraint based writing games and collage, within academia and technology contexts. More recent examples include just reading and Time Well Spent. Jessica is open to collaboration and facilitation, please get in touch Jessica[.]Dylan[.]Foley[@]gmail[.]com.
In 2016, Jessica was awarded a Doctorate (2011-2015) from CTVR/CONNECT, Trinity College Dublin (unpublished Thesis available here and here). She continued as a postdoctoral researcher with the Orthogonal Methods Group at CONNECT until 2018, when she was awarded an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship with Prof. Rob Kitchin and the Building City Dashboards team at MUSSI (2018-2021). This research explored how poetic fiction can be used to parse the academic worlds of networked digital technologies, such as internet of things and smart cities.
Her visual and poetic work has been exhibited, performed and curated nationally (IMMA, NCAD Gallery, Highlanes Gallery, West Cork Arts Centre) and internationally (HDLU Zagreb, PS1 New York, Tate Modern) since 2007. Most recent publications include Sprout Poetry Journal, The Stinging Fly, and Bath Magg.
Jessica has been a co-conspirator of and collaborator with — The Writing Workshop with Jessamyn Fiore; Difference Engine with Mark Cullen, Gillian Lawler and Wendy Judge; and the Orthogonal Methods Group with Prof. Linda Doyle at CONNECT, Trinity College Dublin.
She is currently Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT).
Jessica Foley 