Abstract Living Rhythms presents Rhythmanalysis+, an artistic research project that investigates how everyday sensory rhythms support regulation, care, and connection under conditions of disruption. The project emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic from a concern with how the breakdown of routine and predictability affected mental health, particularly in contexts where regulation depends on repetition and embodied familiarity. Grounded in lived experience of neurodivergence and informed by island life on Sherkin Island, the research treats everyday sensory rhythms — wind, salt air, tides, birds, movement — as forms of situated knowledge that often remain marginal to language-centred enquiry.
Working collaboratively with four island residents during periods of enforced isolation, the project gathered sensory accounts of daily life through phone calls, Zoom conversations, sound recordings, photographs, and drawings. Rather than treating these materials as data to be analysed, they were translated through drawing, sound composition, and virtual reality into an immersive environment that operates beyond language. Spoken voices and environmental sounds are present within the work, but meaning emerges through rhythm, spatial sound, and embodied attention rather than explanation or narrative. Virtual reality functioned not as spectacle or representation, but as an ethical mediator, allowing sensory, emotional, and relational information to be held together without exposing participants or requiring physical proximity
The research demonstrates how artistic practice can function as a mode of enquiry into minoritised, embodied knowledges that resist standardisation and extraction. What emerged was not a fixed outcome, but an ongoing process in which rhythm became both method and material. Through reflection and writing, the project continues to evolve, raising open questions about care, technology, and how sensory life and forms of regulation have shifted in the aftermath of COVID.