Future Artifacts presents the artistic research of five 2025 MA Candidates at the Burren College of Art. Bringing together painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and experimental material processes, our work is rooted in a refusal to lose the imagination battle with facism. In a time of genocide and ecocide, we draw upon history, myth, folklore, and alchemy in our attempts to metabolize collective grief and insist on speculative futures of survival and interdependence. 

My work in Future Artifacts approaches wild pigments as teachers who have much to say about human impacts; colonial occupation, settlement, agricultural development, and more. Woven into patchy and ongoing maps of place and relationship, they are the navigational tools that I have assembled as I orient myself towards futures of mutual flourishing

Map 1. Planted/placed. A collaborative project of 99 postcards with artist-made watercolors from hazel, nettle, daisy, dandelion, beard lichen, and blackberry. Organized by geographic location.

Map 2. In the family of things. Natural dyes from weedy or abundant plants found on Cappabhaile hill on Irish wool and linen fabric, beeswax and found parrafin, weavings with found material and trash woven on handmade hazel loom.

Photography by Tom Flanagan, courtesy of the Burren College of Art.