Daisy Agnes Jones

I am a spoken word artist, literary storyteller, and ritualist working at the intersection of voice, memory, grief, and sensory experience. My work is rooted in the body—in breath, in sound, in the unspeakable things we carry—and asks what it means to speak into silence, or to let silence speak back.

Much of my creative practice emerges from personal experience. I grew up with selective mutism and am autistic. My relationship with language has always been intimate, volatile, and nonlinear. I spent years in quiet—listening, absorbing, encoding emotion into gesture and rhythm before I ever spoke it aloud. When I eventually found a home in spoken word, it felt less like performance and more like recovery. To speak became not only a creative act, but a radical one—one that held the possibility of healing.

Grief is the heartbeat of my work. Not just grief as mourning, but grief as presence: the lingering breath, the echo in a room, the residue of a person you once loved. We live in a culture that struggles to hold grief honestly or artistically. My work resists that silence. I believe in making space for the untranslatable—through poetry, sound, ritual, and sensory design. Whether I’m singing to ashes, writing names into salt, or crafting sonic landscapes from found objects and ghost voices, I am always asking: How do we carry the ones we’ve lost? And what carries us, in turn?

My background in therapeutics has deeply shaped this approach. In 2019, I began training in trauma-informed yoga and meditation in Costa Rica, with a focus on adapting embodied practices for disabled individuals, people recovering from injury, and those living with PTSD. After returning to the UK, I facilitated neural rehabilitation sessions for stroke survivors in Leicester, exploring how mindful movement could support memory and cognitive recovery. During the pandemic, I deepened this work, training with the Soma Yoga Institute and founding Neuroga—an initiative dedicated to the intersection of neurological health and creative embodiment.

This therapeutic foundation has taught me to move slowly, to prioritise care, to listen for what isn’t said. It taught me how to build spaces—both literal and metaphorical—where vulnerability and transformation can take place. These values now underpin every creative project I undertake.

My novella Salt in the Ink was one of the first pieces where I began to merge these worlds—creative writing, memory work, and ritual. It’s a story told through shifting perspectives and lyrical fragments, set inside a house that slowly begins to flood in the wake of a death. The book imagines grief as something architectural, osmotic. Salt gathers on the walls. Objects hum with memory. Characters communicate through breath, touch, and sound more than through dialogue. It’s a work of magical realism—but it is also deeply grounded in how grief feels: porous, submerged, heavy with residue. This book taught me that stories don’t need to resolve. They need to resonate.

That belief fed into my recent collaborations, including Soundstrokes—a performance experiment with The Melody Crafters where we explore real-time audiovisual storytelling. In the pieces we create, a visual artist paints live using a digital brush, while a musician maps sonic inputs onto visual patterns—pitch becomes colour, volume becomes line thickness, rhythm becomes pattern. I contribute spoken word as a third layer—my voice adding narrative texture and thematic shape to the composition. The result is a kind of live synesthetic improvisation. We aren't illustrating a story—we are co-creating an emotional landscape. This has opened my eyes to how voice can function as more than content: it can be spatial, relational, visual, and ritualistic.

These experiences are now converging in my latest and most ambitious project: The Breathing Archive. This work is a live ritual of remembrance, told in borrowed breath. It blends spoken word, ambient sound, AI-generated ghost voices, field recordings, projections, and participatory offerings to form a living archive of loss. The audience is not simply watching—they are invited to contribute: names, memories, breath, griefs too small or too strange to be shared elsewhere.

I enter the performance as a kind of mythic crow—a gatherer of fragments, a speaker of names, a carrier of salt. The performance becomes an act of collective remembering, where stories are nested inside sound, inside objects, inside breath. It is a space where grief doesn’t have to be cured or resolved, but can simply be honoured as a companion.

Creatively, The Breathing Archive is pushing me to grow in every direction. I am developing new skills in sound design, live looping, installation building, and digital interaction. I’m learning how to guide a room emotionally and technically—how to hold people through difficult terrain with care, clarity, and generosity. I approach this process with a student’s mindset: humble, experimental, driven by questions rather than answers.

What matters to me is creating work that listens as much as it speaks. That offers not just beauty, but holding. That says: you are not alone in your remembering.

This is why I make art.

This is why I breathe into the quiet.

And this is the work I feel called to do now—with everything I have, and everything I’ve lost.