THE ÁIT COLLECTIVE OUTLINE THEIR COLLABORATIVE ETHOS AND RECENT ACTIVITIES INCLUDING AN EXHIBITION AT THE DOCK.
The Áit collective (previously ^) cultivates collaborative research, experimentation, and dissemination by working with the north County Leitrim community and landscape as mutual co-creators. To achieve this, we organise and host events in our workspace in the centre of Manorhamilton that we run together. This has taken multiple forms, such as social gatherings, symposia, rituals, workshops, walks, shared meals, and the exchanging of knowledge and stories.
Áit translates from the Irish language as ‘place’ or ‘position’. Our workspace is situated within a strong farming community, close to the border with Northern Ireland. It is ideally located to engage with audiences not usually reached by conventional art spaces. The collective was initiated by our outgoing member Shane Finan, and currently has four members: Tara Baoth Mooney, James Kelly, Laura McMorrow, and Sonya Swarte.
Our workspace is always in the shadow of Benbo Mountain – a constant, mutable presence in the town. The studio allows the collective members and community to explore art in a rural context. We believe that the creation of work rooted in place and the local landscape can enable innovative and meaningful collaborative work. The Áit collective is dedicated to creating collaborative works of art in the context of wildness. Our work within the space and beyond uses worlding practices that bring human and non-humans into community, conversation, encounter, and care.
Leitrim is distinct for its thriving ecosystems, supported by small-scale, low-impact farming and traditional land stewardship that allow wildlife and agriculture to co-exist. Meadows are the result of a very intentional balance of care between humans and the land. In comparison to other parts of Ireland, Leitrim has a much lower uptake of intensive farming practices, which has resulted in a unique habitat of semi-natural grasslands and rich biodiversity. However, due to the vulnerable nature of this land and the low population and rurality, Leitrim and surrounding areas have had to be defended over the years from hydraulic fracturing (fracking), immense wind turbines, overabundance of Sitka spruce forestry, and, most recently, gold prospecting in the Five Glens – distinct glacial valleys of the Dartry Mountain Range.
The work for our recent exhibition, ‘Waking The Land’ at The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon (22 November 2025 – 14 February 2026), began with the potential loss of Benbo Mountain to extractive goldmining. We created a wake for the mountain to celebrate its life and liveliness and highlight its presence. We moved between ‘waking’ and ‘awakening’, presenting work that aimed to both wake and ‘waken’ the land and ourselves.
In ‘Waking The Land’, Áit collective honoured symbolic, spiritual, and poetic relations as much as material, ecological, and political ones. Our practice and discourse are shaped by this plurality, opening space for gestures that are not about solving or mastering, but about living-with, un-learning, and attuning to the more-than-human in all its complexity. The work was informed and led by encounters with Benbo Mountain, the meadow (five small meadow patches that we each tended and observed over the last nine months), and plant material from these different sites.
The main plant material used was Yellow Flag Iris, feileastram. Once used for fodder, bedding, dyeing and medicinal purposes, it is now relegated to the category of ‘weed’. It both thrives on and creates water-logged ground and reproduces quickly.
All of the materials used in the exhibition were found, collected or were already at hand. Wool was collected from the barbed wire fences; old bed sheets and a worn woollen blanket were dyed with yellow flag iris root, dock root, and iron. A found piece of silk was presented as a mutable framing for the rhizome that dyed it. Hazel and Sally rods, a cow skull, rocks, seeds, plants, bones and other found entities accompanied us into the gallery space. The stitches in the banner bale covers follow the guidance of the materials themselves; the threaded paths are intuitive and purposely untethered from formal cartographic systems. In these gestures, land is reimagined as relationship rather than cartography, unfolding through tending and attention, as opposed to measuring and territory.
The outside world was invited inside to inhabit the former courthouse, a building once bound to order and judgement, now reimagined as a site of porous encounter. In this assemblage, we actively juxtaposed the building’s previous and current uses, co-locating histories of colonial order and classification with chaotic immediacy and unpredictable encounter.
An ‘opening ritual’ procession for ‘Waking the Land’ – acknowledged the potential loss of our beloved Benbo Mountain while also celebrating the reawakening of the vast life it breathes into our land.
The ÁIT Collective is based in Manorhamilton, County Leitrim.
@wakingtheland
