Inhale Exhale – Ecologies That Refuse to Behave is an ambitious solo exhibition by artist Fiona McDonald, unfolding as a quiet insurgency staged through peatlands, sensors, and slow code. Across the project, McDonald hijacks the tools of climate science – flux towers, CO₂ sensors, automated chambers – and reroutes them into something they were never designed for: ecological intimacy. Developed through years embedded with the National Parks and Wildlife Service NPWS, these instruments are treated not as neutral data-harvesting devices but as collaborators, shaped by shared data, trust, and sustained attention.
The exhibition draws on real-time CO₂ data gathered from Eddy Covariance flux towers that monitor peatlands by measuring the ecosystems’ “breathing.” While attending to daily CO₂ cycles over four years, McDonald observes the data gradually settling within the rewetted cutaway bog at All Saints Co. Offaly, echoing the landscape itself as peat cells slowly refill with rainwater. Rather than striving for predictive certainty, the works listen to quieter rhythms – embracing drift, fluctuation, and the slow recalibration of restored land.
Formed through restored bogs, shared data, and slow walking with scientists and NPWS contractors, the works emerge from peatlands that store carbon, memory, and breath – living archives whose capacity to store carbon, regulate water, and sustain life is inseparable from practices of care and restoration.
Low-power animations, custom-designed handmade greenhouse gas chambers, data-driven giclée prints, wearable CO₂ receivers, and sensor-driven performances converge into a techno-ecology that resists optimisation. McDonald’s slow-media, small-file methodology privileges ecological time, subtle perception, and minimal energy use. Her data-driven, coded line drawings, developed in JavaScript using low-resolution datasets, position “small footprint” media as a mode of resistance and intimacy.
By visualising CO₂ flux at the rhythm of human breath, McDonald aligns atmospheric processes with embodied human time. Other works trace a lineage to early eighteenth-century glass-chamber experiments that first revealed how plants regenerate air. In We Share the Same Air and a new series of floating chambers developed for a filmed performance at All Saints Bog, the chamber is reimagined not as a sealed container but as a porous, light-permeable ecosystem. Echoing the Wardian case – once an instrument of colonial plant transfer – these works redirect enclosure toward reciprocity and care.
The film Bund Walkers / Cloud Chambers, situated in the rewetted bog of All Saints, Co. Offaly, grounds the exhibition in the living landscape that shaped it.
Bio
Fiona McDonald is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has always been at the nexus of art, science and technology. She holds a BSc in Biological Chemistry from Coleraine University of Ulster, a BA & MA Fine Art from NCAD an MSc in Multimedia systems at TCD 2006. In 2025, McDonald was invited to present her work at SCI_ART 2025, The landmark EU-Canada Symposium of Art, Science and Technology SCI_ART at SAW center Ottawa Canada and Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, Okanagan British Columbia.
Currently resident at Parity Studios UCD, McDoland was also recipient of the RHA Artist Studio Award, 2023 and was Artist in Resident, Innovation and Technology at Talent Garden and DCU Alpha 2021. An established artist, Fiona McDonald has received multiple awards over the years, reflecting sustained recognition for her practice, including Arts Council of Ireland Bursary Award 2025, Project Award 2024 and 2023.
Recent exhibitions include group exhibitions; BogSkin, RHA Gallery 2025, In Real Life, National Gallery of Ireland 2024, PRUF: The Library Project 2024, Monochromatic, Graphic Gallery Dublin selected by Catherine Daunt, Woman In the Machine, VISUAL Carlow, Conscious Makers, NCAD Gallery. She developed Sensing Ecologies a geo-located audio app for Bull Island 2020. Her solo exhibit Gateways, Kings House Boyle was curated by Linda Shevlin.
McDonald has also taken part in exhibitions at Green on Red Gallery, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane and the LAB Gallery Dublin. Her print works have been exhibited internationally in Copenhagen, Paris, New York, LA & Cologne Art Fair.
Image: 01. Fiona McDonald, Bund Walkers and Cloud Chambers, 2026, Still from filmwork, Videographer Lynda Devenney, Image courtesy of the artist.
02. Fiona McDonald, LE-light AllSaints Summer Solstice, 2025, Giclée print, 84 x 59cm, Image courtesy of the artist.
03. Fiona McDonald, Winter Solstice CO2 Flux All-Saints, 2025, Giclée print, 60 x 60cm, Image courtesy of the artist.
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