Wildness is the most threatened landscape quality we have - in less than a century there will be no truly wild places left without human disturbance. Wilderland seeks to explore what these remaining wild places mean for us and for nature.
Wilderland is inviting artists and creative practitioners to create site-responsive, public artworks that explore our relationship to wild nature, and engage with Wild Nephin National Park and the townlands and communities on its periphery to address the biodiversity crisis at a local level.
We are looking for artworks that activate people’s imaginations with regard to biodiversity and habitat loss, and open their eyes anew to their local landscape, its wildlife, and our place in its ecology networks. We are seeking creative ways to engage with communities, to explore their lived experience of place, and open a dialogue about their relationship with nature and use of their local landscape. The goal is to address environmental challenges through collaborative and learning-oriented, place-based engagement, and encourage behavioural change towards people-led climate action at individual and community level.
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This could be through creative community engagement, public events or education activities, embedded research, or site-responsive artworks for installation in the landscape within Wild Nephin and its neighbouring townlands.
Wilderland is committed to supporting sustainable arts practice and promoting environmental awareness for all activities within the project.
Our project artists are dedicated to exploring material choices and processes of production that support this in the creation of their artwork. They consider the environmental impact of their work and how they will approach this during their public art commissions, through materials and waste, travel and transport, and the installation and legacy of their artworks in the landscape.
All our artists support sustainable and low carbon options for their artwork and artistic processes where feasible, and are encouraged to utilise native, natural, found and waste or recycled materials sourced from the locality in their artworks and public and community workshops. The focus is on promoting sustainable use of materials and using collaborative, creative activities to initiate conversation about how we relate to, use and protect our natural environment, its resources and its plant & animal life.
Wilderland is also providing Sustainable Arts Bursary awards to support local artists, creative practitioners or arts collectives in Mayo to develop their practice towards more sustainable and environmentally conscious ways of working.
Find out more about the Sustainable Arts Bursary.
materials matter
Materials Matter / Ábhar Ábhar is a collaborative project devised by three artists and educators, Clare Breen, Mary Conroy and Laura Ní Fhlaibhín. Their individual practices share the common denominator of sustainability and environmental awareness within the process of art production.
Materials Matter, Ábhar Ábhar is a container, a holder, a way of thinking and a movement, that explores the production of sustainable art materials. The aim is to bring together practices and forgotten ways of working that are passed along, embellished, reworked, indigenous or partially remembered.
We live in a time where we need to change our approach to production and consumption. We have all become disconnected from the mass produced products we use in our daily lives - artists and their materials are no exception. These three art workers share the desire to develop and disseminate a way of working that not only reflects their own personal commitment to material sustainability within their practices, but a desire to assist others to make art sustainably.
Wilderland has invited the Materials Matter collective work with to create new artworks for bring their sustainable arts practice to Mayo, to collbarotiev with local community and support local artists in developing sustainable arts practices. [REWRITE THIS]
You can follow their Wilderland activities on each artist’s individual page and project pages, and find out more about their sustainable arts project on the Materials Matter website.
