Carole Keating is an Irish Mancunian artist and producer. She works across disciplines including live art, immersive theatre and interactive play, following the artist-as-initiator model. Her work responds to the injustices and inequalities of late capitalist society, crafting collaborative and empowering spaces of live creative activity co-created with audiences. Her practice is fiercely inclusive and is rooted in joy, care, tactility and play.

Recent commissions include:

No Limits places the audience into the role of the avant-garde artist: co-creating a monumental abstract painting by flying over it on a zipwire

Pass It On models a post-capitalist joy-based economy: offering audiences free joy - a free soft ice cream - when they pledge to pass on that joy to someone else.

Fire Leap With Me is an outdoor work exploring meaning-making through ritual: participants collaborate to paint and build a solstice fire installation, before a playful leaping ceremony.

Carole has 15 years’ experience in programming and producing large-scale works for public audiences at major arts organisations including Manchester International Festival, Somerset House, Science Gallery London, Pinwheel and Brighter Sound, working with a wide range of international artists across disciplines including immersive theatre, visual art, live music, dance and mass participation. Carole’s producing work has appeared in national and international press including The Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, Vogue and Artnet, and has won a CityLife Awards Event of the Year.

Carole is based at Somerset House, London.

Carole Keating is an exciting emerging artist. I have no doubt of Carole’s ability to propose innovative, inventive and above all entertaining methods of casting the audience as lead-players within an unfolding playscape. 

Bren O’Callaghan, Curator, Artichoke

Praise for The Academy of Painting and Decorating:

By the end of a series of paint-based “exams”, strangers are working together to draw pictures of the festival using paintbrushes wedged in their elbows, toilet brushes and hand mirrors, grinning in their plastic sheets.

★★★★★ The Independent