Dr. Anna King (PhD, MA, BA) is a published author, artist and ethnographer living in Ireland.
Anna King - Photo credit: Julia Dunin
Anna’s work unfolds through graphite, watercolour, photography, sound and poetic prose. Her practice explores relationships between landscape, memory and perception.
Her artwork is particularly concerned with how a place is gradually revealed through encounter and return: what first draws the eye, what emerges over time, and what remains obscured or only partially known. Through shifting perspectives, dissolving boundaries and the interplay between form and formlessness, her landscapes carry an allegorical dimension, with light becoming an invitation to look beyond what is immediately visible.
“My practice is rooted in a lifelong relationship with landscape. I grew up walking ancient paths in the west of England, where I first began to understand what the fields were teaching me. I was learning how to be with a place, and how returning to the same ground awakens a memory in the body that the mind never knew. Those early experiences continue to shape my work, drawing me back to the mysteries of place again and again.”
More on where my practice began
Since completing her PhD, Anna has developed an evolving creative practice that brings sustained observation into dialogue with imagination and lived experience. Her artistic research has been supported through a range of funded projects and residencies, enabling sustained, site-responsive enquiry into relationships between people, place and the living world.
Selected Projects, 2026
SeedWays
SeedWays is Anna King’s Irish artistic and ethnographic enquiry into seed sovereignty and seed as living inheritance, developed as part of GrainCommons, a Nordic-European artistic research collective exploring grain as living cultural heritage.
ARRIVAL, Ballindoon House, Sligo.
Artist Residency on the shores of Lough Arrow.
ARRIVAL explores the experience of approaching and encountering a historic landscape through visual art, poetic prose, sound, mapping and attentive observation.
Rooted in site-responsive research at Ballindoon House, the project unfolds through slow walking, sensory engagement and creative practice.
Tracing a series of approaches to the house and surrounding landscape, ARRIVAL considers how movement, design and perception shape our experience of place.
The residency involves a public field-based workshop followed by an exhibition at Edmondstown House in association with the Ballaghaderreen Arts Festival, 2026. Funded by (NIAH) National Built Heritage Service, and the Ballaghaderreen Arts Festival.
The Well Gathering
The Well Gathering is a public art and community engagement project by Anna King and Dominic Keogh, developed in response to the Plots and Spring Well in Ballaghaderreen. Drawing on the site’s storied past, the work explores gathering as both memory and practice through sculpture, research and process.
Commissioned as part of the Plots Town Park development, the project is funded through the Rural Regeneration and Development Fund, in partnership with Roscommon County Council and Creative Places Ballaghaderreen. 2026.
The Lazy Wall
The Lazy Wall: Reimagining the Plots as a Shared, Living Landscape is a participatory art project by Anna King. It is supported by the Roscommon County Council Creative Ireland Programme.
The project draws on the history of The Plots, Duff’s Well & the old creamery, where daily life was shaped through shared labour, social exchange and cooperation.
Inspired by the Lazy Wall, where farmers gathered as they waited to weigh their milk, the project reflects on these everyday acts of coming together as spaces of connection, storytelling and collective experience.
Artwork
Anna's current work explores how a place gradually reveals itself through encounter and return: what first draws the eye, what emerges over time, and what remains partially obscured.
Unfolding | Graphite Drawing on Fabriano Artistico Hot Pressed TW. July, 2026
LifeWays
Evolving from the foundations laid in 'The Cherry Blossom Tales', this new body of work traces memory as it moves through reflections at River Cong. It explores the visible and unseen patterns that carry experience across time and terrain through visual art, sound, and poetic prose.
Past Projects
The Cherry Blossom Tales
A creative nonfiction project that brings the past to life through storytelling, art, folklore, and community recollections. Funded by Roscommon County Council Creative Ireland Programme 2025, this initiative involved a series of dynamic workshops with students at St. Nathy’s College, culminating in an exhibition during the Ballaghaderreen Arts Festival, 2025.
PlaceWays
During Anna’s Creative Places Ballaghaderreen Artist Research Residency (2023 - December 2024), she developed PlaceWays, a project exploring how places are lived in, known and remembered. Funded by the Arts Council and Roscommon County Council.
Book, published in 2022, by Austin Macauley Publishers.
Anna is co-author of Rekindling the Fire: Food & the Journey of Life with Dr. Martin Ruffley.
Doctorate in Philosophy from University of Galway
2009-2014: PhD (Ethnography and Arts-Based Methodologies).
Title: An Alternative Gathering: Public Space and Shared Agency in the Lived Experience of Multicultural Ireland. Anna’s research was awarded a prestigious three-year full-time Irish Research Council Scholarship.