There was an abundant crop of apples, I think it was the hot weather in May that was responsible for this, we gathered 16 boxes and visited Trass apple farm in Tipperary where they were juiced into pure organic apple juice.

Rooted Utopias: Our Future at Play

Curated by Karla Sánchez Zepeda

11th October – 1st November 2025
I went to Wex-Art Festival Gallery at Westgate Heritage Centre.

Rooted Utopias: Our Future at Play

Our current world requires a re-telling of stories that incorporate other beings, human and more-than-human, as well as a re-imagining of structures and modes of living and doing. New and better futures grounded in nature have to be dreamed of and worked on without delay. 

Karla Sánchez Zepeda is the art historian, curator, and cultural producer. She has participated in numerous educational, research and curatorial projects in Ireland. She is involved in interdisciplinary collaborative practices, and the construction of the concept of the rural.

Following some profound emotional upheavals I sought a place that I could respond to, Lough Oighin with the familiar landscape features of Wales. I wanted to complete a Masters in process and respond to this site artistically. To "Materialize a sense of place noting the holy wells, the lakes, rocks geological and archaeological remnants".

In the epoch of the “Anthropocene”, art can play a significant role to influence

people, both to protect our natural world and to participate in raising awareness,

that can benefit community both local and global.

The paper would examine human perception and our role in mapping of a specific environment.

Relational Entanglement

Betelgeuse incident occurred in January the 8th 1979. When the french owned oil tanker caught fire and exploded at the gulf oil operated jetty at Whiddy, the resultant fireball killed 50 people. At that period of time what was a vibrant community of 450 now has a population of 30 people approximately. The effects of an oil disaster on the environment leads to widespread habitat destruction, direct harm to wildlife for example marshlands are effected, direct harm to wildlife for example oil coating birds and contamination of seabed and food chain contamination. Decline in seals and Dolphin population.

MODES OF ENQUIRY

VISUALISING RESEARCH

CONCEPT MAPPING

SCHEMATIC DRAWINGS ON SITE

CONTEXTUAL RESEARCH EG OF ISLAND EG FILM PHOTO 

Pictorial features of Whiddy island (see image 1)

Small schematic representations (see image 2)

New Ways of Thinking

Reference: Anthropocene Islands, Entangled Worlds (Jonathan Pugh, David Chandler) and New generational way of Being, Ontology, ways of Knowing. Epistemology (see image 3)

Methods

Tap into all senses in response to a site e.g.

• Journaling/document/mapping.

• Mirror/reflection/ vision.

• Atmospheric changes /sensing/feeling.

• Film /movement/sound.

• Visual sounds: Lapping, waves (vision sound movement is the sonification of a process where data is translated into sounds).

  
  

Visual Research
“There is a common thread that links these scenes and memories — the spectacle of life in all its varied manifestations as it has appeared, evolved, and sometimes died out. Underlying the beauty of the spectacle there is meaning and significance. It is the elusiveness of that meaning that haunts us, that sends us again and again into the natural world where the key to the riddle is hidden. It sends us back to the edge of the sea, where the drama of life played its first scene on earth and perhaps even in its prelude; where the forces of evolution are at work today, as they have been since the appearance of what we know as life; and where the spectacle of living creatures faced by the cosmic realities of their world is crystal clear.”

Rachel Carson

Walked the shoreline on Sherkin, listening to Rachel Carson’s readings on the littoral space between the land and the sea. 

Shore to the Sea

Using painting to highlight interior thinking and articulate the concerns of protecting a unique site i.e. shoreline (see image 4).

Collaboration

This work was a collaborative process with fellow students (see image 5).

Water Movement (see image 6)

Research Question

In the epoch of the “Anthropocene”, art can play a significant role to influence people, both to protect our natural world and to participate in raising awareness, that can benefit community both local and global.

The paper would examine human perception and our role in mapping of a specific environment.

Research Influences

Writers on Environmental Aesthetics

• A. Berliant

• Alan Carson

• Emily Brady

• John Muir Pluralistic E. Aesthetic

  
  

Practitioners: Land Artists

• Agnes Denes, Wheatfield Battery Park New York (1982)

• Ana Mendita

• Andy Goldsworthy

• David Nash

• Richard Long (1945)

• Robert Smithson (1968)

Environmental Artists

• Yayoi Kusama 

  • Immersive ‘Dot’ sculptures.

  • Infinity Mirror room.

• Patrick Doherty, Stick Sculpture Castles.

• Nancy Holt (1938), land earth conceptual art, site specific installation at Lismore Castle (2021)

  
  

Background Landscape Art Representation

• Painting in the era of the “Picturesque” and the ”Sublime”

  • Claude Monet.

  • J. Constable.

  • J.M. Turner.

• Landscape Features

  • Prehistoric Cave Art.

  • Nazca Lines, Peru.

“Environmental Art has moved away from land art…towards a deeper relationship to systems processes and phenomena in relation to social concerns” (Linda Weintaub, Restorative Stance 1990 Reclamation).

ONGOING CYCLE  EXPLORATION

WITH FEEDBACK AND CREATION

EG MY SKETCH PAD,NOTES ABSTRACTING,COLOUR STUDIES,NATURE OF OBJECTS ON SHORE

WORKING THROUGH MY IDEAS

AND REVIEW

Brainstorming, Journaling and Background Reading (see images)

BUT OF ITS DEVELOPMENT

A DYNAMIC SERIES

ON GENERATIVE IDEAS

Gathering of Objects (see image 1)

Painting of mussel en plein air (see image 2)

Rocks barnacle and blue stone (see image 3)

Outcomes

I would welcome the contribution of the Artistic Interdisciplinary team that I’m studying with whose methodologies can lead to creation of new protocols (languages).

The Ecologies of Hope: There is too much emphasis on destruction. Sea levels rising, receding glaciers, change to marine habitats. What we need is hope, a starting point to an alternative future.

Environmental Art: has become a focal point of exhibitions around the world as the social and cultural aspects of Climate Change come to the fore.

MAKING SOUNDS

READING OUTLOUD

MOVEMENT

SINGING

GESTURAL ACTIVITY

Aims

I’d hope my creative artwork that reflects my responses to a site, may also awaken in others, what they also already have in them. I am drawing inspiration from philosopher Lao Tzu, "going with the flow".

Walking along the shoreline

Words and imagery can convey the tactile nature of the environment.

"Dark Ecology", Timothy Morton, 2018.

Her artwork reveals a profound appreciation for the act of trying. Trying to catch a certain slant of light, trying to prove a pattern or uncover a composition, trying to fathom a mountain, trying to hold time still. Working with the moving image, mark making and sculptural materials such as glass and wood, O’Malley’s work attempts to contain and reflect the weight and wonder of the world in its becoming. It is the act of trying, in the face of predictable failure, that gives way to conviction and a sense of hope within the artist’s work. Full of reflection, both literal and metaphorical, filled with absence and framed by negative space, O’Malley’s work asserts something unstoppable about the human spirit, something that neither distance nor death can extinguish’

Exhibition text by Kate Strain, Grazer Kunstverein, 2018

It is an emotional connection that allows my art to respond, and it is a reflection of natural landscape features, that are too often disregarded. For example hedgerows, wetlands, marine life, castle ruins, wells and trees. It is the culmination of my observation overtime to the site which I came across in 2025. And I visit regularly at weekends. The reflection is a meditation of what can be lost through our current climate crisis, I regard this special site as almost a scientific enquiry into the effects of human activity over years, centuries which left faint traces on the earth, and which impacts on biodiversity loss, changes to marine habitats and climatic changes.

This project will teach me how to capture sound, record flora and fauna and what we can perceive more than see and film silently the image of the Lough in a dark room that can project the topographical features with a yellow green light source to capture the natural phenomena of bioluminescence.

Research Influences:

Writers on Environmental Aesthetics

● A. Berliant

● Alan Carson

● Emily Brady

● John Muir Pluralistic E. Aesthetic

Land Artists:

● Agnes Denes, Wheatfield Battery Park New York (1982)

● Ana Mendita

● Andy Goldsworthy

● David Nash

● Richard Long (1945)

● Robert Smithson (1968)

Environmental Artists:

● Yayoi Kusama, ‘Dot’ sculptures.

● Patrick Doherty, Stick Sculpture

● Nancy Holt (1938), land earth conceptual art, site specific installation at Lismore

Castle (2021).

Background Landscape Art Representation:

● Painting in the era of the “Picturesque” and the ”Sublime”

○ Claude Monet.

○ J. Constable.

○ J.M. Turner.

● Landscape Features

○ Prehistoric Cave Art.

○ Nazca Lines, Peru.

I’d hope my creative artwork that reflects my responses to a site, may also awaken

in others, what they also already have in them. I am drawing inspiration from

philosopher Lao Tzu.

Methods:

Tap into all senses in response to a site e.g.

● Journaling.

● Mirror/reflections.

● Atmospheric changes.

● Film.

● Visual sounds: Lapping, waves (vision sound movement is the sonification of

a process where data is translated into sounds).

Medium:

Using painting to highlight interior thinking and articulate the concerns of

protecting a unique site.

I have always worked in the material of paint, I am now trying video work as a new format in my practice.

Like her I am trying to record sound and moving image. I would like my work to develop in the same way.

This work is similar to the way I would visually describe water colour drawings with movement. I find it playful and engaging.

"Video is a device extending the boundaries of my interior dialogue to include the audience" Page 13, I Want To Live In The Country And Other Romances by Susan Morgan, 2006

"She employed mirrors as props and structuring devices, separated performers and spectators by great physical distances, and eventually incorporated live video feeds that multiplied and fragmented viewers’ perspectives of her actions. Mirror Piece I (1969) featured performers carrying oblong mirrors in slowly choreographed movements before the audience, alternately reflecting their own bodies and the surroundings, and offering the audience a flattened view of itself as an image within the performance" Nat Trotman Guggenheim Museum, 1969.

"Drawing is never merely preparatory it is shaped by not knowing. Images take shape beyond sight" Tacita Deane, Blind Folly or How Tacita Dean Draws by Michelle White, 2024

Drawing is an important visual method for her.

"The Wreck of Hope is all about a collective memory, in a sense, because it's about the destruction of, you know, the melting of the Arctic or the Polar Arctic, or basically the melting of ice. That's Antarctica. It's the destruction of our planet. To some extent, how it was, was a collective memory that we are losing. So, I guess there's always something about disappearance in what I do" Tacida Deane, Pinault Collection 2023

As an ocean swimmer I find her visuals convey immersion.

With a sculptural and performative practice rooted in specific sites. The ways in which materials stick to and transform locations and communities is of particular interest to me: from the patterns of peatlands to the textures of the intertidal zone, materials are a way of connecting to more-than-human bodies, helping us navigate more sustainable pathways on a range of scales. 

"Painting left propped up for days anchored against the wind by stones, somehow left to absorb the atmosphere to become physically part of it. To get grit, sand, grass, spray onto the canvas"

"In the early ‘60s she used collage in many works, including natural materials found in the landscape (seeds, sand flowers and grasses) while in her late tenement paintings she introduced sweet papers, cigarette wrappers and newspaper scraps" Gayle Ritchie, The Press and Journal, 2021

"The direct connection with the landscape is increased by the inclusion of real grass and seed-heads, stuck into the paint. Eardley used collage in a few of her later works to heighten their immediacy" National Gallery of Scotland, 2020

He uses a squeegee across the wet paint, it is a method that I am investigating.

"The truth... When they have a similar structure to and are organized in as truthful a way as nature. When I look out of the window, then truth for me is the way nature shows itself in its various tones, colours and proportions. That's a truth and has its own correctness. This little slice of nature, and in fact any given piece of nature, represents to me an ongoing challenge, and is a model for my paintings." Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009).

"The most impactful art goes beyond outrage to convey the urgency of the situation" Rachel Thomas, Dear Earth: Art and Hope in the Time of Crisis, Hayward Gallery, London, 2023

This project will teach me how to capture sound, record flora and fauna and what we can perceive more than see and film silently the image of the Lough in a dark room that can project the topographical features with a yellow green light source to capture the natural phenomena of bioluminescence.

Lao Tsu

Barony Carberry west, Community empowerment hub.

Developed bio-digester. People bring waste feed to digester and the bi -product of this is methane gas. Which is supplying natural energy.

The island by virtue of its isolation has a rich biodiversity and stable habitats. There are not a lot of cars.

Pre famine it was reported to have pop of 1052.

But after the famine if 1845 rapid decline in pop. Emigration to USA.

To combat entropy one must continue to exert Negative Entropy. Energy to create order.

Entropy is linked to anxiety and uncertainty and humans are driven to manage this. And we try to maintain stability and personal evolution often arise from re-building after disruption.

Requiring intentional effort to create meaning and structure in life.

Cape Clear is the most southerly point of Ireland. With the exception of the Radner rock which lies 4 miles south west. It provides the islanders with a beacon of safety against the treacherous seas.

Ink drawings containing all the scientific names around the images.

The population of the island increases in the summer months as students visit the local Irish Colleges, Coláiste Phobal Chléire and Coláiste Chiaráin. Students stay in local houses or dorms and improve their spoken Irish as part of the immersion courses within the Gaeltacht.

Every first weekend of September, the island hosts the Cape Clear Island International Storytelling Festival. The festival has been running annually since 1994.

It would have been nice to converse I heard a conversation on the boat journey to cape clear. Orleans chlorite

Sherkin Island has a population of 100 approx. This increases in the summer season.

Picture 2: Northshore Bed & Breakfast and Sherkin Ferry

Tourism is one of the main income sources to the island.

Materials that could inform my palette.

Examples of Entropy