Michael Heaney Space/Time Artist 2021

Michael (68) has been selected to take part in Space/Time 2021, a creative retreat for older early career artists run by Magnetic North in partnership with Luminate.

I was involved in the arts when I was at school in Northern Ireland.  I came to Scotland to study at the University of Aberdeen in 1972, and have lived in the city ever since.  After university I was lured into the nascent Scottish oil industry where I worked for 40 years.  During this time I continued to write, including for my two children, and increasingly in collaboration with them.  In 1998 I returned to university part-time to complete a Masters Degree in Technology and Management, graduating in 2001.

During my working career I often had ideas for novels, plays and TV shows but I had little direct engagement in artistic practice.  I occasionally also wrote a poem or two.  In 2018, now retired,  I participated with my daughter, Geraldine Heaney, in an Artists and their families workshop at Tate Britain, led by Joshua Sofaer.

My work includes writing, photography, and artificial image-making from existing digital photographs.  I have plans for a new collaboration with my daughter inspired by a copy of Lessness by Samuel Beckett, which I bought in Aberdeen’s Oxfam bookshop a few years ago; it was a first edition, an ex-library book from Banff, never borrowed and then withdrawn and sold.  I want to create a piece that takes it back to Banff library.