Spotlight on Arts – Miffy Ryan Live Art
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This Spotlight on Arts episode features live artist and curator Miffy Ryan in conversation with John Coster and Rob Watson. Miffy reflects on her journey from early creative interventions at school to her current practice of live art, curation, and community collaboration. She discusses using art as a language to process emotions, challenge institutional expectations, and create open, improvisational spaces where people can explore creativity on their own terms. Highlights include her “Lady of the Sea” performance at Leicester’s Highcross shopping centre, her focus on trust and vulnerability in collaboration, and her role in the upcoming Docspace exhibition. The discussion explores how art can shift perceptions, resist rigid outcomes, and bring people together through humour, emotion, and shared experience.
In this episode of Spotlight on Arts, John Coster and Rob Watson are joined by artist and live performer Miffy Ryan. The conversation traces Miffy’s creative journey, from her early interventions as a teenager through to her current practice as a live artist, curator and community collaborator. What stands out is the way that Miffy uses art as a language to process emotions, question expectations, and create spaces where alternative ways of being can emerge.
Miffy reflects on her experiences in education, where she was placed in remedial units and often labelled as disruptive. Instead of silencing her, these challenges became the foundation for her live art, expressed through performance, movement and sound. She recalls making bold interventions at school, such as wearing forks in her hair or carrying a giant papier-mâché pencil, which set the tone for her later work exploring performance as a means of communication beyond words.
The discussion highlights Miffy’s approach to curation and collaboration, which is shaped by openness, improvisation and vulnerability. She describes how she draws people into creative processes without rigid planning, often relying on trust and shared emotional engagement. This way of working stands in contrast to institutional expectations of structure, funding, and measurable outcomes. Instead, her focus is on building new communities of practice and enabling people to find their own creative language.
The conversation also turns to the importance of live art in everyday spaces. Miffy recalls her “Lady of the Sea” performance at Leicester’s Highcross shopping centre, where she used found materials and improvised costume to challenge and disrupt the ordinary rhythms of the commercial environment. For her, such interventions are about shifting perception, provoking thought, and often making people laugh.
As the discussion develops, Miffy and her hosts reflect on how art can resist the drive for control, planning, and outcomes. Instead, it can be about creating experiences, sharing moments of humour, and enabling people to step outside routine ways of thinking. With upcoming collaborations in the Docspace exhibition, Miffy continues to explore these ideas, particularly through the relationships between performers and photographers, and the hidden support networks that sustain artistic practice.
This episode offers a vivid portrait of an artist who embraces risk, resists conformity, and seeks to make creativity a shared and transformative experience. It is also a reminder that art can emerge from anger, joy, frustration, or humour, and that it often flourishes most when it breaks free of fixed expectations.
