Featured artists: Louis Haugh, Tadhg Kinsella, Laura Skehan
Evolving Landscapes brings together three contemporary Irish artists whose practices critically engage with the realities of ecological crisis, time, and the politics of perception in a rapidly shifting environment. The exhibition responds to the intensifying urgency of climate change by foregrounding artistic methods rooted in listening, site-specificity, and material entanglement with landscape, aligning with a broader artistic turn toward situated knowledge and ecological justice.
Time, across this exhibition, is not linear but layered, functioning as an affective, political, and geological force. Louis Haugh explores the intersections of lived memory and deep time through a multidisciplinary practice rooted in Ireland’s east coast. His work reflects on how landscape becomes a timeline, a stratification of generational knowledge and ecological decline, using personal narratives as markers of environmental change. As Donna Haraway suggests in Staying with the Trouble, “We require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles.” Haugh’s work insists on staying with complexity, acknowledging the intimacy of ecological damage without recourse to spectacle or abstraction.
Tadhg Kinsella intervenes in this temporal and spatial field through sound. His recent research into water levels along the Fingal coastline transforms site-based recordings – tidal movements, erosion, wave pressure – into immersive sonic compositions that make perceptible the otherwise imperceptible rhythms of the climate crisis. Kinsella’s approach aligns with the expanded sensory and data-based strategies discussed in Art in the Anthropocene, where co-editors Davis and Turpin note: “Art does not represent the Anthropocene. It constitutes one of its conditions of possibility.” His work invites the listener to dwell in dissonance, to attend to environmental change not through spectacle but through embodied resonance.
Laura Skehan, in her sculptural and video installation Mutual Taming, presents a nuanced exploration of human-nonhuman entanglement through vessel forms and organic materials. Her work gestures towards care, containment, and ecological precarity. Through practices of fragility and repair, Skehan’s work echoes T.J. Demos’s critique in Against the Anthropocene, where he argues that “aesthetics must not merely reflect environmental violence, but actively resist its visual regimes.” By refusing heroic gestures or monumental scale, Skehan proposes an alternative ecology of attention; one in which tenderness and tactility become political.
Evolving Landscapes refuses the distanced aesthetics of the global Anthropocene narrative and insists instead on localised, relational, and materially grounded forms of ecological response. It foregrounds practices that do not simply document collapse, but actively experiment with new temporalities, new collaborations, and new ways of being in and with the world.
As Hannah Ritchie reminds us in Not the End of the World: “We have the tools, the knowledge, and the resources to build a better future. What we need now is the commitment to use them.”
This exhibition proposes that art, in its capacity to attune, disturb, and reimagine, is one such tool, and that climate action must begin not only with data or policy, but also with perception, care, and imagination. Together, these practices invite reflection on how landscapes evolve – physically, politically, and emotionally – in the face of an accelerating climate emergency.
https://www.instagram.com/louishaugh/?hl=en
Ardgillan Castle, Balbriggan
Dates: 19th September – 12th October 2025
Opening Reception: 19th September, 5.30 – 7.30pm
Location: Ardgillan Castle, Balbriggan, Co. Dublin, Ireland
Selected reviews: Totally Dublin https://www.totallydublin.ie
Supported by and in partnership with
