Gwen Stevenson
Ritual of Small Gestures explores peace as fluid and relational, shaped through attention, presence, and interaction. Using real-time hand tracking, viewers’ movements send ripples across a pond, where tadpoles follow their own rhythms, largely indifferent to human action.
The water becomes a site of encounter between human gesture and more-than-human life. Disturbance here is not disruption but part of a shared ecology. Ripples spread, soften, and return to balance, suggesting that peace emerges not from control but from recognising our place within living systems, humans, flora, fungi, and countless other species.
Within this expanded understanding, peace is inseparable from respect for sovereignty, anti-colonial perspectives, and awareness of inequalities produced by extractive, profit-driven systems of power. The work frames peace as fragile, ongoing, and collective, inviting reflection on how small actions resonate across shared environments, and how care, fairness, and equitable sharing foster just, sustainable coexistence across human and more-than-human worlds.
Gwen Stevenson is an immersive artist and socially engaged practitioner based in Northern Ireland on the UK/Ireland border, a context that shapes her engagement with peace, conflict, and coexistence. Her practice spans interactive installation, performance, film, and community-based work, with a focus on embodiment, agency, and ecological responsibility through accessible immersive systems. Recent projects, The Game Plays You, Verdant Shifts, and Generative Decay | Lough Neagh, explore the entanglement of digital systems, human behaviour, and environmental consequence. Her durational performance Memorial / UnMemorial (2023–2024), marking the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, involved daily border crossings while reciting the names of those killed during the Troubles, framing remembrance as an embodied, ongoing process. Grounded in over two decades of socially engaged practice across Northern Ireland, including healthcare, residential, and community settings, the artist has worked with diverse communities to explore identity, intergenerational experience, and social cohesion in post-conflict contexts.
“Rituals of Small Gestures”, video installation
