I felt an urgent responsibility to explore the complex multi layered realities of the Climate Emergency. I found a powerful lens for this in the landscape of our bogs, their wonderful sentience, their layered histories and memories, their incredible biodiversity and their beneficent capacity for mitigating the impact of fossil fuel pollutants.
This project explores the connection between bog landscapes and the climate emergency. Who are the bogs carers? What lies within that landscape, just under our feet and behind what we first see? How do bogs absorb air pollutants? Do bogs speak; is anyone listening?
I want to evoke a feeling response in the viewer. To this end I deconstruct used materials, stories and objects and remake them into new and unexpected configurations. I used sculpture, sound and paintings based on my photographs. I have also used video, recycled materials along with natural materials found in the bog landscape. Ancestry, Bog Hermes, Bog Sculpture and Future Texts register the ‘sraitheanna’ or layers I encountered in Girly, Lodge, Lullymore and Lixnaw bogs.
- Ancestry: Wedding trousseau for Old Croghan Man’s marriage to the Iron Age goddess.
- Ancestry: Old Croghan Man's shroud, mother remembers her 25-year-old son's cold bog burial.
- Bog Hermeneutics: Matthijs is Hermes walking the bog tolling a climate bell.
- Bog Hermeneutics: Matthijs is Hermes...stepping in contretemps?
- Bog Sculpture: Plop goes my heartbeat: Sphagnum moss water cell miracles.
- Bog Sculpture: Cocooning moss breath.
- Bog Sculpture: is anybody listening?
- Future Texts: Wilding Bog Vocabulary: Calendula, Mullein, Marshmallow, Yarrow, Anti-inflammatory?
- Future Texts: Hoard, Reliquary, New Words on the Tongue?
- Girly Bog, Triptych in One; Bog Pool, Lodge Bog. Acrylic on Canvas, 40"X30"