HOLLIE KEARNS DISCUSSES A NEW ARTIST’S DYE GARDEN AND ASSOCIATED WORKSHOP PROGRAMME AT WORKHOUSE UNION.

In December 2024, friends of Workhouse Union gathered in a community meitheal to clear a small section of an adjacent paddock. It was the first public moment of the Colour Field – an artist’s garden cultivated to nurture colour-giving plants for use in art and textile practices. Many plants that we know as pervasive weeds are in fact colour-giving and medicinal companions that our ancestors would have been in relationship with. The Colour Field is already home to dock, nettle, willow, hawthorn, and yarrow plants, and our plan was to enhance the plot with an abundance of colour-giving plants.

The Colour Field weaves many long threads of practice and connection together; environmental, community, art, and practices of place. Workhouse Union is home to PrintBlock Callan, established there by Liz Nilsson. Last year, artist facilitator Michelle McMahon, Rosie Lynch (Creative Director) and Noortje van Deursen (Creative Producer & Co-Design Facilitator), were rethinking the ongoing Pattern Makers programme, and ways to reduce toxic art materials, when the idea of the Colour Field emerged. I was invited to develop the Colour Field and to share my personal practice in natural dyeing, textiles and nature connection. I am, by training, an art historian, but natural dyeing has always felt close to alchemy, combining my research into the colourful, pre-colonial, textile history in Ireland, with intuitive nature connection and just the right amount of scientific process to achieve strong colours from plants on cotton and linen.

Luke, a young grower in our community, grew the plants from seeds which we sourced from Irish companies and friends. Our plant list is long but includes traditional dye plants such as woad to make blue, weld to make yellow, and madder and Lady’s Bedstraw to make red. We are growing introduced plants, such as Dyer’s Coreopsis and Dyer’s Camomile, and lesser-known dye plants, such as native medicinal St. John’s Wort, and novel colour-making plant, Black Knight Scabiosa. 

A free public workshop programme launched in April 2025 with GREEN, a full day spent with nettle. We gathered, drank and ate nettles, dyed on cotton, and embroidered nettle motifs with naturally dyed threads. The response to the programme launch was immense, and we have been blown away by the diverse and engaged participant group across the year. The natural dyeing process is long and slow, and the workshops were intended as introductory skills for working with natural colour on textiles.  

Workshops in RED and YELLOW in May and June explored further printing and dyeing techniques with madder, weld, onion skins and fresh flowers. Finally, at Skill Share in September, Michelle and I finished the public programme with BLUE, a two-hour workshop using fresh indigo leaves, which thrived in our polytunnel, to achieve a range of turquoise and teal on lengths of silk. Throughout the workshops, our conversations explored the plant connections that can inform contemporary artworks. The process of producing colour on textiles has been a sacred practice across cultures and across time until the exploitative fashion industry practices of the last 150 years took hold. What layers of meaning can natural colour produce in a contemporary cultural context?

Making Colour was an open-call supported residency programme last July. Marielle MacLeman, Annie Hogg and Sylvia Maher undertook a week of rich and experimental dye research in the new outdoor dye studio, exploring deep questions of process, labour, and care. In August, I led the Open Studio Workshop, a three-day collaboration with six artists, which allowed us to go through the process from preparation of fabric to finished dye together. We chose three plants to work with: madder, dock seeds, and dyer’s camomile, which we then modified with iron, alkaline, acid, and copper solutions. By the third day, we laid out a beautiful spectrum of strong colour on cloth.

Many dye plants in the Colour Field will take a few years to mature – a natural cycle that ensures a long-term commitment to the place and the practice. For the coming year, we have commissioned two artists to make new work which will explore plant colour stories and support the development of the garden. Our workshop and event programme will deepen our connection with natural colour and the sacred, ancient, and innovative potential of plant-based colour for artists. More information can be found on the Workhouse Union website.

Hollie Kearns is Co-Founder of Workhouse Union and an independent curator.

workhouseunion.com

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I first encountered Siobhán McDonald’s work in her solo exhibition, ‘Eye of the Storm’, at The Dock in 2012. That body of work explored the experience of time via glacial and environmental phenomena, most notably through the volcanic landscapes of Iceland. It considered the idea of measuring a journey to the centre of the earth via seismograms, created by Irish Jesuits in the early twentieth century. In an essay for the exhibition catalogue, Tim Robinson wrote: “As the world turns … The artist observes, records, relates. Since the Cosmos and all that’s in it were born of a singularity, all things are related. The task of the artist is to trace the lines of this universal cousinage.”1 

The following conversation took place on the occasion of McDonald’s latest exhibition, ‘The Bogs are Breathing’, currently showing at The Model in Sligo. Working alongside climate scientists and cultural institutions – such as the British Antarctic Survey, the European Commission, and Trinity College Dublin, McDonald utilises a range of materials (plants, bog water, bog dust, quartz, ancient ice water, volcanic ash) along with songs and stories associated with the intangible cultural heritage of Irish boglands. She examines our relationship to the earth, how it has formed us, and how we, in the age of the Anthropocene, are negatively delimiting its lifeforce and future. 

Nessa Cronin: Can you tell us a little about your own background and how you got started in this kind of practice?

Siobhán McDonald: As a child I spent a lot of time in nature. We lived near a forest in County Monaghan and a lot of my time was spent exploring, drawing, recording, and collecting. Now I find myself collecting and recording in wild landscapes, art studios, physics labs, museums, and archives. So, a lot of the time, my process is about finding something, leaving it, and coming back to it at a later date. My drawings and paintings have a similar flow; it’s like a stratum of activity – layers are laid down one upon another. This allows a process to develop over time.

NC: I’d like to explore more about your working routine. Where do your ideas initially come from and how  do you develop your projects? 

SMD: Making art, to me, is an evolving story – it is an everchanging, organic process that drives me to keep searching, drawing, and painting. Usually, my practice functions like a tremor rippling out quietly. In this way, the artworks usually emerge in a slow distillation over time. When I’m painting, I tend to work on several canvases or boards at the same time. This period is exciting and experimental where I use a range of materials to explore processes and reactions. After a time, I start to see connections and signs that drive the work forward. For instance, making the sound score for A world without ice (2022) evolved over two years to imagine new scenarios for landscape and, in particular, how our world will sound after the ice disappears. Lately, I’m searching for new ways of listening to nature and developing works and ideas using the senses, as well as mycorrhizae and other underground networks in the skin and soil of the earth. 

NC: Can you outline some new works that are in your exhibition? 

SMD: ‘The Bogs are Breathing’ at The Model brings together a selection of works spanning locations from the Arctic tundra to Irish boglands with new productions that aim to transform the gallery spaces into a sensory experience. I began by spending two years at international cultural institutions, including the Palais de Bozar in Brussels, and the EU Commission in Ispra in Northern Italy, to research the power of bogs to transform our air. In tandem back at home, I explored numerous bogs such as Bragan Mountain, where my grandfather and great grandfather cut turf to keep the cold out. I explored its ecosystem, history and mythologies to consider ideas around time and the preservation of collective memory in that thin layer between peat and plants, where some of the most important changes are taking place. 

The exhibition consists of sculptures, paintings, sound works, a library of lost smells, and several films inspired by the ‘doctrine of signatures’ – an immemorial text on medicinal plants which sees in their silhouettes the shape of human body parts that they can heal. The presented work invites us to consider the air we are breathing in, the beauty and vulnerability of our lungs, and the fate of our future generations. One such series, entitled Cosmic Gas (2022), fuses materials derived from poisonous invisible methane gas and poses the question: What manages to live in the ruins we have made? Consisting of drawings, paintings, and lithographic prints, these works bear the direct imprint of plant fragments I collected from boglands – matter from previously living organisms which over time have become gaseous. The drawings appear delicate and complex, conveying the light and dark histories from which they emerge; they recount stories of life and decay, from remedy or medicine to the poisoning of an ecosystem. The work is rooted in the medieval mythology of boglands as a cultural preserver, offering insights into ancient pagan times. 

NC: Using materials from these landscapes seems integral to your making processes. Why is this materiality significant for you?

SMD: I think it’s important to use the material and matter that has evolved through time. One of the main works in the exhibition is inspired by a collaboration with The Centre for Natural Products Research, Trinity College Dublin, entitled Distillation of the ephemera (2023). Consisting of plant species that I’ve gathered from numerous bog sites across Ireland, the work seeks to create connections to the ancient pharmacy that lies beneath our feet. These ancient, rich and fertile landscapes are the sole custodians of a varied and unique biodiversity that has accumulated over many millions of years. A number of these plants have documented use in ancient medicine for a variety of cures. I have sutured them together into a delicate shroud. 

NC: I’m reminded how perceptions of the bog have changed so much in Ireland in recent years. Once considered ‘empty’ places with little value, we now understand their importance in terms of ecosystems (carbon sinks) and also their preservative aspects in terms of the archaeologies that they hold. 

SMD: Joseph Beuys describes them as “the liveliest elements in the European landscape, not just [for] flora, birds and animals, but as storing places of life, mystery and chemical change, preservers of ancient history.” ‘The Bogs Are Breathing’ responds directly to Beuys’s thinking in this area to encourage awareness of the cultural, historical, biological, and climatic significance of bogs. 

Nessa Cronin is a Lecturer in Irish Studies and Associate Director of the Moore Institute at the University of Galway. 

Siobhán McDonald is an artist based in Dublin whose practice emphasises fieldwork, collaboration and working with natural materials. 

siobhanmcdonald.com

‘The Bogs are Breathing’, continues at The Model, Sligo, until 9 July. 

themodel.ie

1 Tim Robinson, ‘Seism’, in Siobhán McDonald, Eye of The Storm (Dublin City Council, 2012) p 9.

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