Map 2. In the family of things
A map of Cappabhaile hill investigating land history through plant pigments. Dyes from hazel, nettle, bramble, bracken, seaweed, daisy, bolete mushrooms, and dock root on Irish wool and linen fabric, beeswax and found parrafin, weavings with found material and trash woven on handmade hazel loom.
Booklet with map key and writing that brings together my ancestry, English occupation in Ireland and the US, deforestation, and textile industrialization.
Detail: nettle fiber dyed with hazel leaves and iron, linen weaving, backed with waxed Irish linen
Detail: waxed hazel leaves, linen weaving, backed on waxed Irish wool
Detail: Hazel buds, linen weaving, backed on waxed Irish linen
Detail: ewe feed bag found on Cappabhaile hill, linen weaving, back on waxed Irish wool
Map 2. In the family of things was shown at Future Artifacts, which presented the artistic research of the 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 approached 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.
Photography by Tom Flanagan, courtesy of the Burren College of Art.