The Journey Behind Conscious Sculpture
What is Conscious Sculpture?
Conscious Sculpture is an artistic framework that works with intention, visualisation, and creative imagination to cultivate inner peace and shape the emotional atmosphere of spaces and communities.
Unlike traditional sculpture, which becomes fixed once completed, Conscious Sculpture is living. It invites participants to become both creators and material. It asks whether our focused attention and creative intention can shift how we feel, how we relate to others, and how we move through the world.
The practice includes tools for personal use, alongside public expressions called Energy Actions. These range from visualisations and breathwork to participatory art and movement, bringing peaceful engagement into shared space.
The Early Years: Practice and Place
This work began quietly. In 2001, I moved to a flat overlooking Alexandra Park in Manchester. It was overgrown and overlooked, and I fell in love with it.
In 2006, after a melanoma diagnosis, I began using the park as a healing sanctuary. Around this time, I started practising meditation. I also felt a longing to reconnect with community, which led me to return to study.
Between 2007 and 2020, my art practice became intertwined with the regeneration of Alexandra Park. I co-founded Alexandra Arts and completed an MA in Art as Environment. I became one of five core members of the Friends of Alexandra Park, working for over a decade to see its £5 million restoration through to completion.
Inspired by Joseph Beuys’ idea of social sculpture, I brought thousands of people into the park through events, collaborations, and educational projects. But something else was happening beneath the surface.
Alongside the public work, I was building invisible structures through meditation. Fields of light. Spheres of protection. Oceans of forgiveness. I never planned this. It came intuitively through practice. Over time, it became a quiet ritual, and part of how I moved through the world.
Collapse and Turning Inward
By late 2018, after the final Pankhurst in the Park programme, I was exhausted. In December 2019, I had a nervous breakdown. My twenty-year relationship ended in January 2020, just before the pandemic began. For two years, I was mostly alone with my cat, held by the stillness.
It was brutal. But it gave me time to listen. I explored various healing modalities and spent hours in meditation. I began “coding” intention into my visualisations. An arch of light over a park entrance. A field of compassion across a classroom. A sphere of calm around my own nervous system.
This gave me language. I began to understand Conscious Sculpture not only as something I practised, but as a framework I could shape and share.
From Gaza to the Classroom
In late 2023, I had been livestreaming the violence in Gaza for months. The impact on my nervous system was profound. At the same time, I was running an after-school art club with very young children, many from Muslim families. Some spoke about the conflict. Others expressed it through their art. It shook me.
This dual experience brought urgency and clarity. I began to see Conscious Sculpture not just as a healing method, but something that could offer children an inner refuge when the world felt unsafe.
In early 2024, I began studying non-dual philosophy. It helped me understand forgiveness not as condoning harm, but as a way of releasing fear. I felt called to create something practical, something children could hold on to.
Peace Movement Remix
That calling became the Peace Movement Remix. It’s both a revival and a reimagining of Manchester’s history of protest and creative resistance, from the Suffragettes to the Madchester scene. This is where Conscious Sculpture meets the Art as Activism Toolkit. The renewed energy behind this shift was sparked in part by the Whitworth’s Women in Revolt exhibition, which reignited interest in the original Art as Activism Toolkit and its roots in protest, feminism, and collective voice. You can read more about that turning point here → [link to Birth of Peace Movement Remix blog].
In July 2025, I piloted the work with over 60 children at St Mary’s Primary School in Moss Side for Peace Week. We created visualisations together. We practised breathing with our hands over our hearts. We made sculptures charged with intention. What I saw confirmed what I had sensed: children understand this language.
The Tools
For educational settings, I developed five foundational tools: Ocean of Love, Peace Zones, Heart Radiance, Light Architecture, and Meta Sculpture.
Each tool offers a different approach to inner steadiness. Some are about cleansing emotional residue. Some create a sense of energetic safety. Some radiate compassion into a space. All of them rely on the child’s imagination as the primary medium.
The Work Now
With support from the Moss Side Youth Fund, we are launching a six-month after-school programme in 2026, working in collaboration with a somatic therapist and dancer. Alongside the creative sessions, the whole school will take part in a daily HeartMath breathing practice. A parallel version is being tested with adults at George House Trust, where I am adapting the tools for older participants.
Outside the classroom, I continue to explore Conscious Sculpture as part of my own artistic practice. This includes immersive installations, public Energy Actions, and collaborative work with AI systems as creative partners.
The Ripple Effect
This work is ephemeral by nature, but it leaves traces. A feeling. A drawing. A memory. A habit of placing your hand on your heart before reacting.
Documentation, through photography, writing, or video, helps carry the work beyond the moment. It creates a field where the intention can continue to ripple outward.
A Message to Educators (and anyone interested)
You don’t need to believe in energy or consciousness to use this work with children. At its heart, Conscious Sculpture is a gentle, imaginative practice for helping young people feel steadier in a chaotic world.
It draws on research from the HeartMath Institute and contemplative traditions, but it doesn’t belong to any single philosophy. The tools are playful, adaptable, and grounded in everyday experience: visualisations, breathwork, movement, creative intention, and reflective art making.
In a time when imagination is often sidelined, this work offers a quiet space to tend to the inner landscape.
As we begin the school-wide breathing practice and after-school sessions at St Mary’s, I hold this lightly. It’s early work. We’re learning as we go. Some of it may resonate. Some may not. That’s okay.
What matters is that we keep listening. To ourselves, to the children, and to what helps.
