Collins & Goto Studio

Environmental Art, Deep Mapping & Ecological Instruments

Deep Mapping Lough Boora Sculpture Park

Art, bogs and the end of the peat harvest in the Irish Midlands

A dialogue about bogs, energy, art and landscape futures: the narrated overview of the project, from the studio’s 2020 “quarantine productions” (27:37).

ArtistsTim Collins & Reiko Goto Collins

Years2019–2020

WhereLough Boora, County Offaly, Ireland

CommissionOffaly County Council and Bord na Móna, with the Arts Council and Creative Ireland

On this page

Introduction

What role can art play as Ireland’s peat harvest comes to an end?

Lough Boora Sculpture Park was made on cutaway bog: land left behind once the last commercially viable peat had been removed. In August 2019 Offaly County Council and Bord na Móna commissioned the studio to propose an artist-led “deep mapping” of the park and the contexts that shape its meaning. The goal was to help agree an exceptional and sustainable artistic vision for its future, and to give artists and scientists considering a residency there a historic, cultural and ecological starting point.

“Deep mapping” is an attempt to become conscious of a place and its many layers of experience, meaning and value. It takes experience, attention to images, reading and writing, a commitment to lived histories and current debate, and walking and talking with a wide mix of people. It means holding several ideas about the same place at the same time, and it is ideally a collective exercise.

Bog lands are not wastelands. Raised bogs are as monumental and significant as redwood forests. Sphagnum is an extraordinary living thing. It is small, fragile but at the same time resilient, never harmful.

Reiko Goto Collins, Deep Mapping (2020)

1

Contexts & Themes

The Irish boglands have moved in less than a hundred years from an everyday condition of Irish life, to wasteland, to fuel resource, to carbon sink and valuable habitat. Each shift brought an upheaval in economy, society and culture, and in people’s relationship to the land.

Historic context

In 1846 the House of Commons debated the reclamation of Ireland’s “waste lands”: over six million acres of it. A century later Bord na Móna industrialised the Midlands peatlands to fuel the nation, with peat-fired power stations such as Ferbane, opened in 1957 and demolished in 1999. Lough Boora and Turraun were the first large raised bogs in Ireland to be cut away until the resource was exhausted. They were also where experiments in reclaiming the land began, first for agriculture and forestry, then for public space, recreation and amenity. In the time that bought, nature regenerated in surprising ways, and a sense of an emergent Irish wilderness took hold.

Sculpture and the parklands

Between 2002 and 2010 curator Kevin O’Dwyer, working with Bord na Móna and the Lough Boora Parklands Group, ran an ambitious programme of collaborative art, engineering and material reuse. Artists were embedded with the Bord na Móna engineering team, and the work drew its gravity from industrial materials and scale. The park won national awards, but by 2010 the partnership had begun to fray, and it took until a new Memorandum of Agreement in 2019 to start again. The first generation of artists gave form to the industrial past. The next has to work with ecosystem services, carbon and biodiversity.

Ecology

Around the park lies the ring of “Boora” bogs, some rewetted as wetlands and lakes, others just beginning. Beyond them are the surviving raised bogs: Clara, Moyclare, Ferbane, Mongan on the pilgrims’ path to Clonmacnoise, and Raheenmore, more than fifteen metres deep in places. Biodiversity and carbon sequestration are the values behind Bord na Móna’s withdrawal from peat. People still cut turf to heat their homes, and the bogs carry archaeology, poetry, spiritual meaning and a growing recreational life.

Sculptures at Lough Boora: a tall triangular timber frame and a train of rail wagons on the cutaway bog
60 Degrees (2002) by Kevin O’Dwyer, with Michael Bulfin’s Sky Train (2002) behind.

2

Sites & Locations

The book maps the places the study drew on, in the Midlands and beyond:

  • Lough Boora ParklandsThe Sculpture Park and Discovery Park on the cutaway bogs of the Boora complex, County Offaly.
  • PollaghWhere the modern narrative of Bord na Móna’s Boora works begins, in 1951.
  • KilcormacHome of the Kilcormac Development Association, whose 1994 feasibility study and 1998 conference first imagined a future for the cutaway.
  • TullamoreOffaly County Council, which commissioned the study and published the book.
  • Clara Bog and Mongan BogLiving raised bogs nearby, the measure of what the cutaway once was.
  • North Mayo Sculpture TrailA sculpture-in-landscape project begun a decade earlier, compared with Lough Boora.
  • Askeaton Contemporary Arts, Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Scottish Sculpture WorkshopArts organisations whose models of residency and practice informed the options for the park.
  • GlasgowThe studio, where the research was assembled and the moss grew in jars by the window.

3

Research Strategies, Methodologies & Artistic Approaches

3.1 Walking, talking and reading

The team walked the bogs and the park and talked with those who know the land, its art and its culture: retired Bord na Móna land manager Tom Egan, the artists Michael Bulfin and Alan Counihan, Catherine Farrell and others. They built an archival baseline from the 1994 feasibility study, the 1998 conference on the future use of cutaway bogs, Bord na Móna’s own history, and decades of ecological reports. The Artist Placement Group’s mantra, “context is half the work”, kept coming up.

3.2 The workshop and the public meeting

On 29 November 2019 the team brought together artists, Offaly County Council members, planners and arts and heritage officers, Bord na Móna ecologists and land managers, curators and writers. After presentations on the history of Lough Boora and on art, society and ecology, two working groups took up the key questions. The evening was opened to the community: local artists, a farmer, business people, past and present Bord na Móna staff, musicians, educators, conservationists and landscape architects.

  • Should the park be an outdoor sculpture museum with a resident curator, a workshop for artists, designers and craftspeople, or an integrated arts and ecology research centre?
  • What is the right geography: the Sculpture Park, the whole Discovery Park, the Boora complex, or the villages and conservation bogs at Clara and Mongan too?
  • How would Kilcormac, Ferbane and Tullamore benefit from cultural investment as the industrial economy comes to a halt?

Many saw art and ecology as the only direction worth taking.

3.3 Environmental art working

The book closes with case studies and models from artists and arts institutions working through new ideas about nature and culture, and a reflection on the different ways artists come to environmental questions. These are overlapping ways of working rather than separate categories, meant to help partners commission artists to grapple with society and the public good.

4

Conclusions

The elephant in the room is climate change. Drying out bogland, then milling and burning peat for national energy, made sense after the war and during the oil crisis. It makes little or no sense today. The unanswered question is what will replace it.

Will the response to the end of the peat harvest have the same cultural potential as the industrial peat harvest? Will the land that ‘opens up’ after harvest, shape the communities that surround it in new ways? Do the arts have a role to play in shaping that future condition?

Deep Mapping, Afterword

Lough Boora is again at ground zero of a new era of landscape relationships in Ireland. There is perhaps an emergent post-peat public realm in west Offaly, and the idea of an Irish National Park deserves discussion. The challenge is to get the balance of interest, gender and skill right, and to establish a sustainable model that integrates art, science and the public interest: a series of cultural experiments that begin to give meaning and form to the future.

Download the book (PDF, 84 pages)
Order a printed copy

Bibliography

Reading & references

By Collins & Goto

  • Collins, T. and Goto Collins, R. (2020) Deep Mapping: Lough Boora Sculpture Park. Tullamore: Offaly County Council. PDF
  • Collins, T. and Goto Collins, R. (2023) “Ancient boglands and the Irish Peat Industry: Does Culture Mitigate Ecocide?” In Jones, O., Parry, B. and Pigott, A. (eds) Rethinking Art and Creativity in an Era of Ecocide. London: Bloomsbury. doi:10.5040/9781350237261.ch-008

Sources for the study, with links

Also

The book & after

Cover of the book Deep Mapping: Lough Boora Sculpture Park by Tim Collins and Reiko Goto Collins
Deep Mapping: Lough Boora Sculpture Park (2020).
  • The study was followed by the chapter “Ancient boglands and the Irish Peat Industry: Does Culture Mitigate Ecocide?” (Bloomsbury, 2023). A planned exhibition with Offaly County Council was stopped by the COVID-19 lockdown.
  • The bog work continued in HAKOTO / portach / bog (2023–24), listening to sphagnum in the bogs of northwest Ireland.
  • Films: Film & Video.

Credits

People

Collins + Goto Studio, Tim Collins and Reiko Goto Collins. Commissioned by Offaly County Council and Bord na Móna; funded by Offaly County Council, the Arts Council and Creative Ireland. Published by Offaly County Council, 2020; edited by Gill Fremantle.

Workshop participants: Seamus Barron, Michael Bulfin, Stuart Conaty, Alex Copland, Sean Craven, Tom Egan, Dave Fallon, Catherine Farrell, Frank Heslin, Hannah Imlach, Linda Kelly, Christine Mackey, Mark McCorry, Sally O’Leary, Deirdre O’Mahony, Sinead O’Reilly, Amanda Pedlow, Denise Reddy, Joe Ryan, Sylvia Sweeney and Paddy Woodworth.