Branscombe House Artist Residency
January - December 2018 Keely O'Brien was the 2018 Artist-in-Residence at Branscombe House in historic Steveston, BC. Through a series of public workshop, events, and collaborative projects, the residency explored the experience of finding, making, and then losing a home and community. |
Dream Home
November 2018 Dream Home is a site-specific audiowalk which explores the loss, longing, and hope of leaving behind a home. Audience members listening to MP3 players are guided one at a time through the Branscombe House and yard, pausing to hear memories unfold in each room. |
Perfect Strangers
September 2018 Perfect Strangers is a one-of-a-kind experience that invites consideration of how we perceive strangers in the world around us and the potential for curiosity, creativity, and empathy to spark between people who might not otherwise meet. |
You Are Here
June 2018 You Are Here is a community art show about place, home and belonging. Through personal map making, mixed media, assemblage and collage, community members worked together to explore how we create and define home and community. |
Walking Atlas
June 2018 Walking Atlas is an interactive installation of handmade maps, each one representing a different perspective of the same local landscape. These maps document the process of arrival in a new home and neighbourhood, using personal cartography to capture fleeting and often overlooked details of Steveston BC. |
Memory Exchange
September 2017 Memory Exchange is a community art project intending to spark fleeting, personal connections between people who will never meet. An ephemeral flock of envelopes house memories gathered from anonymous community members in this interactive pop-up installation. |
Scatter
August 2017 Scatter is a community seed bomb making art project aiming to improve access to green space in East Vancouver. Community members are invited to drop by and learn the value of greening unused and derelict space with colourful seed bombs made out of recycled paper and non-invasive pollinator seeds. |
Paper Dream
June 2017 Intricate, unique, and mysterious, Paper Dream is a miniature puppet show performed on a pop-up book stage. One audience member at a time is welcomed into the home of an elderly man whose memories and dreams literally unfold before their eyes. |
Invisible City
April 2017 & May 2015 Invisible City is a unique audio experience about illuminating the everyday world by discovering the theatre that is always happening around us and inside us. Revealing, intimate, and strange, Invisible City is a secret theatrical adventure in a public space. |
Apocalypse Parade
September 2016 (Vancouver Fringe Festival) Half carnival pageant, half funeral march, Apocalypse Parade invites you to draw from a hat to decide the fate of human life on earth. Music, glitter, and spectacle open the doors to parallel universe futures of our climate: one jubilant, the other catastrophic. Which will you choose? |
Vivarium
May 2016 (presented at New Narratives) Vivarium is a site specific performance installation piece, which asks: is Nature our intrinsic habitat or are we drawn to its exoticism because we are contemporary urbanites? What does it mean to co-exist with our local environment on colonized land? |
New Narratives
May 2016 Featuring over 40 multi-disciplinary artists, New Narratives is an evening of site specific dance cycling, a life size vivarium, roving fortune tellers and shadow puppet installations, with each audience member invited to curate their own unique experience of the works. |
Wonders of the Ancient World
May 2016 (presented at New Narratives) Wonders of the Ancient World is an interactive shadow puppet installation set in an imagined future. This immersive piece explores human being's fascinating capacity to simultaneously revere and destroy the natural world. 
Radiant Thing
December 2013 Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Radiant Thing uses poetry, movement, and unconventional staging to guide one audience member at a time through the catastrophe and radiance of a daughter growing up. |
Hold On Tightly
July 2014 Intertwining narrative with elements of scavenger hunt, performance art, and visual art installation, Hold On Tightly attempts to re-enchant the everyday world through theatre. 
Elk Walk
June 2016 & July 2014 (Center A Gallery) Elk Walk is a large-scale public puppet intervention featuring five puppets made of found and salvaged materials, inspired by the fossilized skeletons of the extinct Irish Elk—the largest species of deer to ever live. |