M.B O’Toole is a UK based artist, researcher, and associate lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. In 2014 she was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s PhD Scholarship from Sheffield Hallam University to undertake practice-based research.

Memories can be formed around contact with physical objects that populate our everyday lives, we make sense of the physical world by the memories we create. We can create levels of understanding in relation to objects by organising significant memories into stories that hold meaning.

The publication Brutalist Speculations and Flights of Fancy is based on six buildings from the period of Brutalist architecture commissioned for Sheffield in the 1960s. Park Hill Flats, Castle Markets, Moor Street Substation, Holy Cross Church Gleadless Valley, Norton Water Tower and the now demolished Psalter Lane Art School.

A hundred encounters with the wilful force of the tornado. Encounter represents images found on You Tube videos taken by ‘storm chasers’ in the USA. These often shaky images are taken in the heat of the moment, in pursuit of, or flight from the full force of the tornadoes.

Fly Birdie Fly is a product of The Arty Sciency Sporty Art (ASSA) initiative, a cross-college project at Sheffield Hallam University, which intends to use Sport as a gateway into Art and a gateway into Science for the general public

Illuminated Carpet is a sculpture commissioned for 'Enlightenment. International Festival of Light', Durham, UK, in 2008. The image of a Persian carpet drawn in light, appeared to float above the surface of the river, responding to the rippling current, and to cast its reflected image below. The work drew together strands of the city’s histories, evoking Durham’s past without directly mirroring its historic icons.

The exhibition Not For You opened in Berlin at LoBe in April 2011. We used this space to set out a boundary encircling common and contested ground, to externalize a developing dialogue through a structure of mediating ideas.

Time will darken paper is a picture essay examining mimesis as a way to transform our understanding of key texts. The project applies the variorum scholarly technique of comparing variant versions of a text in a single collection to interrogate and reconstruct our view of historical narratives.

If we may agree that there is another unheard language, beyond the ring of our ears, may we begin to say what ‘is being said’, what we ‘are not hearing’? This forces us to look deeper, to search for patterns, to learn how to recognise the forces at play. What do these forces look like?

This performance explores the value of construing the human being as a quasi-musical instrument