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.
Photography by Tom Flanagan, courtesy of the Burren College of Art.
Map 1. Planted/placed
In early summer 2025, I made nine shades of watercolor paint with lake pigments extracted from weedy or abundant plants growing near me in the Burren.
I mailed samples to family, friends, and strangers — most living in the U.S. and Ireland. I asked them to paint me a weedy or abundant plant growing near them, write to me about their relationship to that plant and place, and post it back to me.
The 99 postcards here are organized by geographic location. I harvested lines from the back of the postcards and strung them into a poem, which is available as an audio recording with sound by Paige Gullifer.
Contributing artists
Karina Zimmerman, Theresa Sundin, Marie Carbone, Amber Capwell, Sidney Derzon, Amy Honjiyo, Cricket Liebermann, Noelle Foden-Vencil, Skye Ellison, Emi Osaki, Virginia Dann, Elizabeth Baker, Olivia Martinez, Adam Benedict, Shanta Ambady, A.B. Orlik & Oslo, Yunkyung Lee, Susanna Penfield, Alex Buckelew, Kassandra Ibarra, Sophia Skelly, Leslie Fedorchuk, Christina Marie Heyworth, Gloria Frimpong, Camille Newsom, Amelia Casiano, Hollie Zuniga, Oak, Theodora Eliezer, Rita G. Patel, Charles Cowap, Raechel Velouria, Ashley Zehel, Gabriel Martinez, Lia Musante, Julie Harrison Eastwood, Mirrah Johnson, Ruben Castillo, Madi Lush, Romello Goodman, C. Murphy, C.L. Bigelow, Rosa Diaz, Isabel & Caleb Hajian, Connie Li, Elianna Clayton, Veronica A. Lathroum, Aldice, Kel Richards, Gina Basiliere, Laurie Baron & Hannah Yelnosky, Zoe Cronin, Elissa Best, Apple Faulkner, Ethan Featherson, Melanie Orth, Karen Liebermann, Annie Guion, Kendall Clayton, Charlie Wanzer, Lydia Faesy, Brooke Friday, Ellie Ringer, Tegan Mortimer, Carolyn Shapiro, Andy Shapiro, Koo Schadler, Neely McNulty, Annie Faulkner, Marjorie Layman, Jae Mehdi Zimmermann, Aitana Blevins, Barry Featherston, Allison McKeen, A.J. Gardener, Stuart Webb, Bridget Sakowski, Lily Epstein, Imogen O’Connor, Sara K. Dunn, Kate Quigley, Róisín Doherty, Michelle Granville, Noemi Milani, Patricia McKeon, Amy Shields, Theo Dillon, Meadhbh Ní Duibhne, Ursula Meehan, Lucy Lambe, Sarah Vandermeer, Sarah Treacy, Seraphina Mutscheller, Beckie Bull, Kathy Giuffre.
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
