Maeve Collins
Artist, Researcher, Educator, Producer.
Maeve Collins is an Irish socially engaged artist whose practice is rooted in community collaboration, feminist enquiry, and site-responsive research. Her work explores how we relate to place, land, and each other, treating place not as a backdrop, but as an active collaborator.
Working across Ireland and India, Maeve engages deeply with landscapes shaped by colonial histories, ecological change, and social inequality. Her practice is grounded in long-term relationships with communities, including farmers, local residents, students, and grassroots groups. Together, they co-create projects that combine art, conversation, and collective action.
Her work often takes the form of participatory workshops, public gatherings, and performative events held in spaces ranging from forests and fields to courthouses, town squares, and kitchen tables. These encounters invite dialogue, reflection, and shared making, creating space for empathy, listening, and connection. The outcomes are often both artistic and social, resisting fixed definitions.
Maeve works across multiple media, guided by the needs of each project. This includes installation, drawing, movement, and performance, alongside hands-on, material-based processes. She frequently uses everyday materials such as flour, dough, grain, soil, and fabric – materials that carry associations of care, labour, sustenance, and resistance. Time, slowness, and embodied labour are central to her approach, treated as materials in themselves.
Land is a key focus in her work- both poetic and political. She listens closely to places marked by histories of extraction, erasure, and resilience. Through site-responsive research and presence, she allows the textures, rhythms, and knowledge held within landscapes to shape the work. Her practice draws on decolonial thinking, questioning how power operates through perception, the senses, and cultural systems.
Material actions -such as gathering oats, twisting straw, making with dough, or working with water- become ways of thinking, remembering, and connecting. These gestures hold memory and meaning, functioning as both artistic process and political act. They create space for alternative ways of knowing and relating.
Maeve’s work engages with environmental justice, gendered labour, rural life, and the fragility of ecological systems. By bringing together art, science, local knowledge, and lived experience, she creates projects that are both reflective and practical – fermenting conversations, connecting communities, supporting civic imaginings and enacting change.
At its core, her practice understands art as a relational and civic process: one that senses and makes sense of how we live together within complex and often damaged systems. Through collaboration, care, and shared authorship or usership, her work seeks to foreground voices and experiences that are often overlooked, while contributing to wider conversations about sustainability, equity, and collective futures.