Admission Free but places limited. Please book your free place HERE.
Siobhán McDonald explores the relationship of bogs and their natural preservative properties, drawing on the Faddan More Psalter—a 1,300-year-old book of Psalms unearthed from a Tipperary bog in 2006. The bog’s anaerobic environment preserved sections of the book while leaving voids untouched by time. This paradox of presence and absence is central to her work entitled Filtered Time in which animal gut skin is sutured together with paintings of bog plants in a delicate shroud suspended in a state of transformation. The iron gall ink in the Psalter acted as a preservative, allowing individual letters to survive—an idea she echoes in her works, which explore different forms of darkness in a bog to reveal the natural forces that preserved it.
A Library of Smells, a slow distillation of deep time crafted from plants and mineral-rich bog waters can be experienced during the evening. “Anaerobe,” created by perfumer Julie Barretta, distills thousands of years of buried, shifting terrain into a singular scent experience. The notes are guided by elements of the acid bath of the bog, the soil, the plants and the aroma of anaerobic decay, through tinctures, notes of ink, humus, papyrus, and dust—a nod to the evolution of writing systems inspired by the miraculous discovery of the Psalter—buried in a bog for 1,300 years
Siobhan will be joined in conversation by Dr. John Gillis, Chief Manuscript Conservator, Trinity College Dublin (IRL) who conserved the Faddan More Psalter at the National Museum’s laboratory at Collins Barracks.
Biographies:
Siobhán McDonald was born in New York and lives and works in Dublin. McDonald earned her Master’s degree in Art Practice from IADT, Ireland, in 2011. She works with natural materials, withdrawing them from their cycles of generation, growth and decay. This process gives form to a range of projects which consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time. Her artworks make use of natural phenomena and technologies to stage poetic and philosophical engagements between people and their natural world. Beginning with a specific site of investigation, McDonald weaves diverse narratives into visual stories, often inviting nature itself to participate in the creative process. Her research-driven practice employs a distinctive artistic language to express intangible forces, utilising painting, drawing, film, and sound.
Siobhán McDonald is the recipient of prestigious international awards, including the European Commission’s S+T+ARTS 4Water Award (2024) and the inaugural Ocean Memory Award (2022). In 2023, she received further awards through the EU Commission Alumni Award (Italy), the Alfred Kordelin Foundation Climate Whirl Award (Helsinki), and the Project Award (Ireland). Her work is held in numerous public and private collections.
Dr. John Gillis is Chief Manuscript Conservator and currently works in Trinity College Dublin at the Conservation Department. In 1988 he established and worked as Head of Conservation in the Delmas Conservation Bindery at Archbishop Marsh’s Library, Dublin. Dr. Gilis has taught book conservation techniques and theory in Italy for over twenty-five years. He lectures both at home and abroad and has been published in several journals and books. His major achievement to date has been the conservation of the Faddan More Psalter, a medieval manuscript retrieved from a bog in 2006, at the National Museum of Ireland Conservation Department over a four-and-a-half-year period, for which he won the Heritage Council of Ireland Conservation Award in 2010. In 2021 he published a monograph on the Psalter detailing the art history, conservation, codicology, palaeography and materiality.
Dr. Gilis has twice been a resident scholar in the Getty Research Institute in Los Angles and has lectured widely in the United States while carrying out his research.
