Artist Insights: Catriona Leahy | TULCA 2024
Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.
Catriona Leahy
Catriona Leahy’s digital animation and photographic lightbox series continues her ongoing investigations into the degradation of bogs of the Irish Midlands. State-sponsored strip mining, or ‘peat harvesting’ as it was commonly known in Ireland until the recent cessation of decades of operation, has left behind a post-industrial landscape, and Leahy is one of many contemporary artists in Ireland drawn to its complexities and potential for regenerative thought. Reflecting in a recent interview with Marc O’Sullivan in The Irish Examiner, she writes that she has come to think of the bog as ‘a huge archive, a repository of memory. It harbours a lot of mythologies and histories and traumas, of our own colonial past, and the tensions that arise out of that.’
Bog Thing*: Assembly* for the Symbiocene is a 3D-animated scan of surface area of bog from which peat has been mechanically extracted. The resulting image reveals a form that bears uncanny resemblance to an amphitheatre, albeit a broken, fragmented, one. Leahy’s writings correlate these similarities into speculative understanding:
“As an ancient civic space, the amphitheatre was a place of assembly. However, long before the manmade construction of these historic monumental stone formations, these sites for public assembly (or Things as they were known in the early Germanic Period) were landscape-based forums where important community matters were discussed. Over time, Things moved indoors, became more centralised; land surveying and subsequent land-enclosure slowly did away with the commons, which was a central prerequisite for Thing assemblies/Thing parliaments for discussing things-that-matter.
Here, my Bog Thing aims to reimagine our contemporary political forums where policy is proposed, discussed and ratified, as a kind of landscape parliament – one that represents and brings into the fold the other-than-human entities that we share our planet with. Rather than the bog as Terra Nullius – a nobody’s land – can we reimagine the bog as a space for all species, including human – a dynamic great ecology over which no single group or species holds jurisdiction?”
Documentation: Laura Griffin
