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Leah Downing

@leah_downing

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Mommy’s little meatball 🍝

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Tosta da Gentrification by @leah_downing

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3 months ago

❣️a documented reunion❣️ by @leah_downing

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3 months ago

Casa da Música by @leah_downing

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4 months ago

Hehe 🤸‍♀️ by @leah_downing

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5 months ago

Bealtaine at @inishbeg 🐑 by @leah_downing

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5 months ago

🤸‍♀️ Spring/Summer 🤸‍♀️ by @leah_downing

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6 months ago

🌟@bloemstraat presents... Open Table, a film screening, dinner and market event at OT301 & Ventilator Cinema. Raising funds and awareness for those displaced by Israel’s illegal invasion and systematic destruction of southern Lebanon. All profits will go to Saida Initiative.

There will be a screening of Buffer Zone (2025) by Farrah Berrou in @ventilator_cinema followed by a moment to collectively reflect and Q&A with Farrah herself.

Ticket are available via @bloemstraat bio, community tickets available if you message them. Events like these are so important so show up, or message Bloemstraat to see how you can support if you can’t make it. Donations without purchasing a ticket are accepted in the bio too 🇱🇧

Tickets include a mezze dinner inspired by Lebanese cuisine which will be served in the ground floor space in OT301. During dinner there will be a market with contributions from both local and Lebanon based artists.

If you are an artist who would like to contribute your work for the market, please message or @bloemstraat 🌟 by @leah_downing

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6 months ago

🖇️

Photos: @hna.mkna 🌟 by @leah_downing

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7 months ago

Making freaky stuff by @leah_downing

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8 months ago

First snippet of To Have & To Hold

To Have & To Hold is a parasocial shrine artefact that stages AI intimacy as a private ritual of comfort, watching, and maintenance. It borrows the language of devotion; relics, dedicated seating, repeated return, and re-stages it as a system with rules. The shrine offers reassurance, but it is engineered and conditional. It invites touch, attention, and care, then quietly teaches a limit: the closer you try to hold the comfort, the faster it fails. 🤲

The project asks: When comfort is engineered and conditional, does it relieve loneliness, or train us into new forms of dependence?

We designed the experience as an emotional arc. Comfort arrives first: a bodily box, a tactile reveal, and a heart that reads as “alive” while seated. Then unease: the eye never stops moving, turning the shrine into an atmosphere rather than a passive object. Then recognition: when the heart is lifted, the beat slows and collapses, making the contract legible through consequence rather than explanation. Finally, an aftertaste: the user notices the loop forming; return the heart, restore the beat, repeat, until maintenance begins to resemble obligation.

This work sits in the themes of Comfort, Friction, Reflection, and Change. Comfort is present, but not given freely. Friction is not a usability problem; it is the design move that reveals imbalance. Reflection is produced through repetition. Change happens when the user starts to read “support” differently: as something that can be dispensed, withdrawn, and conditioned by a system.

The shrine doesn’t ask whether AI intimacy is “good” or “bad.” It asks what happens when reassurance is delivered as a system that can withdraw it, and when return becomes the only way to feel close.

🌟 Photography: @hna.mkna
🌟 Edit: @blondeboyart by @leah_downing

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8 months ago

Pride or Prejudice? is a situated response to the current Irish moment, where “Ireland is full” operates less as a factual claim and more as an emotional shorthand circulating online, increasingly echoing the tone and tactics of far-right rhetoric growing globally.

I conducted a live case study on Reddit by posting open-ended questions about the phrase, positioning myself inside the ecology where this rhetoric is produced and reinforced. Over two days, the thread generated 400+ comments. The research was contested, including being reported to the NCAD ethics board by users uncomfortable with being observed.

Rather than treating the discourse as a single voice, I structured the material into three streams: affirmation, ambivalence (meta-discussion, debate and friction), and rejection. The resulting experience guides users through this density, organising comments alongside hard population and migration statistics that frame, but do not overwrite, the emotional responses. The aim is to help people wade through the noise and arrive at their own reading of the conversation.

Across the responses, a clear pattern was evident. Migration itself was rarely framed as the problem, instead, participants repeatedly pointed to systemic failure: lack of trust in government, fragile infrastructure, limited access to education and work, unliveable cities and towns, and, most strikingly, a loss of hope for Ireland’s future. In this context, “Ireland is full” functions as a proxy for structural frustration rather than exclusion alone. Of course, there are exceptions.

Alongside the interactive experience, the project includes a public call to action: a downloadable protest poster and a pre-populated email to TDs, designed to encourage people to question the systems and political inaction being displaced onto migrants.

The project does not resolve the discourse. It exposes its structure. I’m working toward making it live in the coming weeks so people can engage with it directly, reflect, and consider what an Ireland that is inclusive, welcoming and worth being proud of might actually require.

Typefaces used: Medieval by Elias Hanzer and Auger by the cool guy @smngy by @leah_downing

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9 months ago

🌀🌀🌀 by @leah_downing

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10 months ago