Set against the astonishing backdrop of Ardgillan Castle, Evolving Landscapes arrives as a timely and thought-provoking contribution to this year’s Culture Night. Curated by Valeria Ceregini and presented by Fingal County Council, the exhibition brings together three local artists, Louis Haugh, Tadhg Kinsella, and Laura Skehan, whose practices are deeply rooted in ecology, memory, and material engagement with the natural world. 19 September to 12 October 2025
At a moment when environmental thresholds are being crossed at an alarming rate, Evolving Landscapes takes a deliberately reflective approach. Instead of visualising disaster, it foregrounds care, listening, and relationality as tools for navigating ecological breakdown.
Through sound, sculpture, moving image, and site-responsive methods, the exhibition invites visitors to engage not just intellectually, but sensorially and emotionally, with climate crisis as lived experience, not distant abstraction.
Time, in this context, is not linear. It is geological, cyclical, and affective.
Louis Haugh’s work, developed during his Loughshinny Boathouse Residency, explores how coastal landscapes hold memory. Rocks and photographs are treated as parallel archives; each recording light and time in different registers. Haugh invites local narratives into the frame, revealing how everyday stories of place intersect with global ecological shifts. His work speaks to Donna Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble,” to resist neat resolutions and embrace complexity.
Tadhg Kinsella shifts the tempo into aural space. His sound installation translates data from Fingal’s coastline – water levels, tidal erosion, ambient environmental recordings – into layered, immersive compositions. Here, climate change is not seen but felt.
His work resonates with the proposition in Art in the Anthropocene that “art does not represent the Anthropocene. It constitutes one of its conditions of possibility.” In making the inaudible audible, Kinsella reframes listening as a mode of resistance.
Laura Skehan’s installation Mutual Taming brings us close literally to the ground. Inspired by the evolutionary journey of moss, the first plant to oxygenate Earth’s atmosphere, Skehan’s sculptural forms explore the politics of fragility, containment, and ecological entanglement.
Avoiding spectacle, her work proposes what T.J. Demos describes as an “ecology of attention;” a tender, tactile mode of care for the more-than-human world.
Together, these three voices create a space that refuses the detached, globalised aesthetics of the Anthropocene. Instead, Evolving Landscapes insists on the local, the slow, and the situated. It’s an exhibition that doesn’t simply illustrate collapse. It asks how we live through it, with it, and beyond it.
As Hannah Ritchie writes 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.” Evolving Landscapes suggests that art – through perception, imagination, and empathy – is one of those tools.
The exhibition runs from 19 September to 12 October 2025 at Ardgillan Castle and is supported by Fingal County Council for Culture Night 2025.
Words By Valeria Ceregini
Louis Haugh is a visual artist and socially engaged practitioner based in Ireland. His multidisciplinary practice spans photography, sound, moving image, and collaborative processes, rooted in place-based research and community engagement. Haugh explores the relationship between humans and land through ecological time, memory, and environmental change. Recent projects focus on Ireland’s east coast, examining tensions between human and geological time, using lived memories as markers of ecological decline. His work often incorporates fermentation, foraging, and natural processes as metaphors for transformation. A recipient of the 2024 Loughshinny Boathouse Residency Award (Fingal County Council), Haugh foregrounds care, slowness, and collective attention as tools for navigating environmental crisis and proposes that art can help us listen and respond more ethically to shifting landscapes.
Tadhg Kinsella is a multidisciplinary artist and experimental sound practitioner based in Ireland. His work explores the intersections between technology, ecology, and perception, using sound as a medium to interrogate how we listen to and engage with our changing environment. Kinsella creates immersive sonic experiences from field recordings, environmental data, and site-responsive processes—recently focusing on rising water levels and shifting coastlines in the Fingal area. His sound works challenge audiences to attune themselves to the subtle and often overlooked signals of climate change, foregrounding listening as an active, political act. Through installations, performances, and collaborative works, Kinsella invites critical reflection on how sonic practices can mediate our relationship with a fragile and evolving planet.
Laura Skehan is an Irish artist and researcher based between Dublin and Berlin. Her work explores entangled human and more-than-human relationships across built and natural environments, raising ecological and philosophical questions around time, fragility, and co-existence. Working in moving image, sound, and sculpture, she investigates extractive systems and the tension between preservation, decay, and control. Recent exhibitions include Vessels of Time (Turin, 2025), Periodical Review 14 (Dublin, 2024), and INTERZONE (ZK/U Berlin, 2024). Her practice has been supported by the Arts Council, Culture Ireland, Goethe-Institut, and various local authorities. Through immersive installations, she reimagines ecological narratives using moss, minerals, and sound data, examining how memory, knowledge, and climate are inscribed in matter across deep time.
Valeria Ceregini is an Italian Irish-based curator and art historian with over a decade of international experience in curating contemporary art exhibitions, producing sociocultural projects, and building cross-border partnerships. Her curatorial research focuses on ecology, post-humanism, and trans-cultural narratives. She is the founder of MISCIA, a platform supporting artists through mentorship and European collaboration. Her recent projects include This Too Will Pass (GIAF 2025, Galway), Future Fragilities (Diffusissima 2024, Turin, Italy), Prototypes for Cyborgs (Zeitgeist Irland24, Berlin), Periodical Review 14 (PP/S, Dublin 2024), and Towards Super-Connection (Villa Croce, Genoa, Italy 2021). Lately, she has curated with IMMA, RCC, Letterkenny, Hugh Lane Gallery, and Interface Inagh, Co. Galway and held residencies at ZK/U Berlin, SEA Foundation, Tilburg, The Netherlands and PP/S, Dublin. Her work is regularly supported by Culture Ireland, the Arts Council of Ireland, Creative Ireland, and European cultural bodies.
