The ground is kind, black butter

About

Within her practice, O’Neill playfully stretches the ever-evolving iterations of fiction and worldbuilding. From folklore and oral traditions to gaming, her work explores how storytelling can help us reconsider environments and our relationships to them. She questions how stories of other worlds imbibe the way we inhabit our own, and how do these narratives linger within digital realms?

In recent years, O’Neill has focused her research around boglands, digesting these habitats as sites of alterity, borderlands and sites of refuge in histories of colonial dispossession, “wastelands”. Understanding these interstitial zones as containers of local knowledge, O’Neill investigates the peat as a communal archive. These habitats have become significant cultural sites imbued with heritage practices, though their continuing existence is threatened.

Taking its title from Seamus Heaney’s 1969 poem Bogland, this exhibition tussles out the slippery temporality of peat bogs, diving into their mesmeric qualities and mobilising their resistant potential.

This exhibition and its events programme has been curated by Fran Painter-Fleming as the culmination of her Curatorial Fellowship between The De La Warr Pavilion and Flatland Projects.