ARCHIVING HOPE (2024)

Concrete Sculpture, sound, 8 video projections, Natural fauna.

Archiving Hope explores a post-industrial West Cork gravel pit. It is a deep mapping and sensing investigation into the vibrations of life in this temporarily abandoned space and an archive of this new ecological environment. It is in essence a holding place.

This disused 40-acre West Cork gravel pit is a momentary island refuge amidst the industrial-agricultural landscape. It is part man-made lake and part biological desert, a space that has been stripped of thousands of years of its geological history, in essence, it is a new space exposed by extraction now ready once again for occupation and rebirth.

Wind-borne pioneer or ruderal plants whose nutritional requirements are modest are the first to colonise this stony landscape, these live and die and are reborn once again in the ebb and flow of time creating nutrients for future succession species. These are followed by many invertebrates, insects, and small mammals, and there is evidence of a vast variety of wild bird species. It is, in short, an accidental nature reserve where human action is absent, and nature takes charge. Human absence is often all the stimulus that is required for nature’s resurrection, as nature has the great capacity to repair itself, we just need to have the wisdom to let it do so.

Concrete blocks hold fragmented images from this magical island, images of insects and birds, and of delicate flowers, herbs, grasses, shrubs, and tiny little trees, that have erupted from between the stones and rock. The summer beacons are now gone but are immortalised on these blocks, blocks that are made from fragments of the local geological past, this installation re-unites event and actor, as past and present become known.

This iteration of Archiving Hope endeavours to expand the idea that we need more of these truly raw and wild spaces as preservation tools. While conservation projects do offer hope for nature and the planet it may also be the scrappy abandoned car park at the end of your road that can provide the hope we need for environmental restoration.

Special thanks to Paul Green for help with Touch Designer and Noah Snyder with sound.

UILLINN INSTALLATION