Spacemaking as Sanctuary // Water Memory 🌊
(2024–2025) • Immersive Sound Art, Embodied Painting, Archive, Text, Ethnographic Research, & Social Practice
Commissioned by Healing Justice London
The Inquiry
How can our visceral relationship to and connection with nature *specifically water* guide us in co-creating sanctuary spaces rooted in healing, resistance, and long-term collective care? This project interrogates how we experience safety, memory, and belonging within physical geographies, asking how we can repair our relationship with space and make our environments feel safe-enough, accessible, and irresistible.
Practice-Based Research as a Site of Care
Using a trauma-responsive and highly accessible framework, this project bypasses performative institutional gestures to build real alternative infrastructures for marginalized and disabled participants. The core output is a binaural sound art installation built to encourage deep, relational listening. By weaving field recordings, archival textures, text, and somatic prompts, the piece invites audiences to interactively map their own environments. It is designed to be encountered globally and inclusively, explicitly centering care over extraction.
Using a trauma-responsive and highly accessible framework, this project acts as a live methodology for building real alternative infrastructures alongside marginalised and/or disabled and/or neurodivergent participants. The core output is an immersive binaural sound art installation built to encourage deep, relational listening.
By weaving field recordings, archival textures, text, and somatic prompts, the piece invites audiences to interactively map their own environments. It is designed to be encountered globally and inclusively, explicitly centering care over extraction.
As part of my ongoing research, i also made an embodied zine and ran community workshops as part of this larger project: Space is the Place // Spacemaking as Sanctuary ✨ portals of possibility.
Listen/read the text to the the full sound art piece on the Healing Justice LDN website here.
Featured Artworks continue below
Dionne Elizabeth (2024) Water Memory (part of the Emotional Landscapes embodied painting series)[gouache and watercolour on paper]
Dionne conducting sound recordings in the field from the shoreline at Brighton Beach.