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fuilfréamh and lus mór
bloodroot and foxglove

FuilFréamh & Lus Mór / Bloodroot & Foxglove was developed alongside the exhibition Between Dog and Wolf during a residency at Lismore Castle Arts in the summer of 2025. The project evolved through conversations and walks with International Protection Applicants, using plants as metaphors for belonging, healing, and connection.


The work draws on the intertwined legacies of migration and cultural memory. Through experimental photographic techniques—including anthotype, lumin printing, and phytography—combined with digital processes, the garden is reimagined as a contested space where beauty and brutality, order and disorder coexist.


Materiality is central to the work. Pigments from Beetroot, Blackberry, and Rose slowly change under sunlight, evoking both the body and the weight of history. These tactile, time-based processes emphasise the physicality of photography and its capacity to hold memory.


Walking is integral to the approach. Dusk and night walks through botanical gardens become sensory acts of engagement, where touch and the haptic reveal how the garden is both carefully cultivated and quietly concealed. These experiences shape the images, where shadows unsettle opulence and bring hidden narratives to the surface.


The project critically reinterprets 18th-century Eurocentric pastoral imagery, referencing the French fabric Toile de Jouy—produced in France and Northern Ireland’s linen mills. Beneath its decorative surface lie narratives of colonial exploitation. 


The work asks who defines paradise, who tends it, and who is displaced, inviting reflection on the political and personal entanglements of land, growth, and identity, and the urgent need to interrogate the spaces we inhabit.


Botanical names appear on a decorative panel in Irish, Arabic, Latin, and English, layering linguistic histories and fragmenting a singular voice or perspective. 


Images from A R C H I P E L A G O, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 2025. Curated by Davey Moor.


Acknowledgements Lismore Castle Arts, Paul McCaree, Rachel O’Hara, Arts Council Ireland.