“Mary is one of the most talented performers we have produced, a fierce and passionate actor-musician. An astute listener, respecting other’s ideas, but also a proactive and intuitive thinker and organiser. Combining an intense emotional intelligence with a thrilling sense of the theatrical, Mary has a profound understanding of production processes. I am delighted she is channelling her creativity into projects in her native Belfast. 

- Steve Dykes, ATA Programme Director, Rose Bruford 2020

Her thought leadership sits at the intersection of three disciplines: holotropic breathwork, rebirthing facilitation and intimacy coordination. Her perspective centers the cosmology of the female sex cycle and birth as the blue print that shapes us and she has arrived here through considering the transpersonal psychology of the artist in process. De-centering what is made: and centering how we do that - Mary asks what happens when we look at birth as the script - currently under revision? This work comes alive in conversation with thinkers and practitioners across holotropic psychology, feminist theory, film theory, breathwork lineage and the emerging field of intimacy coordination - Stanislav Grof, Adrienne Marie Brown, Julia Cameron, Marshall McLuhan, Sophie Strand, Sondra Ray, Lars Muhl, Émil Haarhoff, Gabor Maté, Peter A Levine, Jessica Steinrock, Ita O’Brien and Kate Lush among them.

Her practice, across all three disciplines is deeply trauma-informed, consent-based and rooted in the conviction: that creative liberation requires safety as its foundation and safety, like consent is a relational phenomenon, a fluid subject, changeable and unique to an individual and or people in context. Within this frame, intimacy becomes vulnerability and is not confined to the sex acts or physical proximity; from a breath journey, to a birth space or a vulnerable scene on a film set - “all art requires safe hatchery” (Cameron, 1992). Mary specialises in this threshold work. She carefully designs spaces where people who are opening and offering, can trust that what is revealed will be held with deeply embodied, informed and ethical care - across a variety of professional contexts.

Her journey with psychoanalysis began with Jung in 2012. Throughout her career as a performing artist, conscious conversations between body and breath supported her growth and restoration. That passion - for psychoanalysis and how it translates somatically through bioenergetics and language was galvanised throughout her Bachelor's at Rose Bruford. Here she embraced methodologies from Mamet, Abramović, Hagen and Meisner, and performed leads in a wide range of theatrical forms and genres across London and Chicago. Investigations into human relationships, community and death, the divine and the taboo were at the heart of her individual research. Mary toured the UK and several European capitals, and through 2020 engaged with WQTN radio station, a collaborative network of friends and change-makers extending from Chicago reaching globally, delivering liberation arts.

In 2021 the Trailblazery called, a global sisterhood rooted in collective psychology, sacred sexuality, art and alchemy, and shortly after, Alchemy of Breath, where Mary immersed herself in training for 13 months, including 12 weeks at ASHA. From there Mary founded Navigating Alchemy and authored Rebirthing Module for the Meta DNA Ecological Bodywork PT- - delivered to over fifty international qualifying practitioners. Other work inlcudes short courses, seasonal series that lean into the wheel of the year, ceremonial programmes and grassroots festival experiences across Ireland and beyond.

At the core of her ethics and ethos is the understanding that we heal in connection and authentic connection understands ‘no’ well. Her Samhain container In Loving Shadow brought together academics, poets, bodywork specialists, musicians, activists and storytellers alongside excavative inquiries and practices. Her artist residency at Banana Block gathered thirteen female performers to share their art on navigating intimacy, boundaries and the cost of the word No - to phenomenal response. She has represented the Equity Women's Committee and served as former Chair of the North of Ireland Branch, where her initiatives with ULF ensured hundreds of Equity members' access to Irish Language and BSL programming that continues to be oversubscribed.

Now pioneering within intimacy coordination, developing funded arts projects and moving toward publication. Mary draws parallels to the tri-directional relationships between doulaship, rebirthing facilitation and intimacy co-ordination in the age of consent, through the lens of the holotropic. The thread running through all of it; the breathwork, rebirthing, screen, stage, ceremony and community - is the same question that has been alive since 2012: what does a body need in order move authentically in connection - and how can I take responsibility for that? Across fifteen years she has developed a rigorous methodology for what happens at the threshold of transformation, applying it across alternative contexts - It’s her desire to express and speak to what she has learned by publishing her work and research in alongside ritual theatre and art projects ready to engage with these themes consciously in conversation with inspiring artists, activists and academics world wide.

“…The more difficult truth is that creative life is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused and the specifically imagined. As we lose our vagueness about ourselves, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment. It is there we contact the creative self." - Julia Cameron