Peat bogs may not be unique to Ireland, but their place in the Irish cultural imagination certainly is. Against the drama of our mountains, and of the waves shaping our rugged shores, peat bogs seem to feature less prominently in internationally Instagrammable ideas of Ireland.
And yet, as the Royal Hibernian Academy’s BogSkin exhibition shows, if you wanted to come up with a geographical feature that best represents the national psyche, it could well be the bog. Just think of all those treasures, memories, secrets, sacrifices and shames lurking beneath the surface: darkened and misshapen, maybe, but enduring.
A signal work in this is Barrie Cooke’s Elk Meets Sweeney, a diptych from 1986. The extinct Irish elk was a frequent subject and theme of Cooke’s work, representing the idea of a once-powerful past and conjuring the unencumbered national majesty of our precivilised times. According to archaeologists, the last great Irish elk died about 11,000 years ago; Cooke’s Megaceros Hibernicus, from 1983, is an epic visual echo of Seamus Heaney’s poetic description of one of the excavated skeletons: “an astounding crate full of air”.
Elk Meets Sweeney adds another element. The magnificent skeletal elk is backdropped by black bog on one side while the figure of Sweeney, crouched like a bog body, holds the ground to the left. Two beings who embody aspects of our mythology hold the balance of imagination. Said to have been driven to insanity by a saint’s curse, Mad Sweeney wandered, half-man, half-bird, finding occasional peace in the trees. In Cooke’s diptych, a flash of rainbowed brightness illuminates the mists in the distance. Is it heaven, spirit or insight?
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Taken as a whole, the piece is a near-perfect picture of the conflicting impulses of our subconscious minds, of church and those older pantheistic belief systems, of nature and culture, and of body and soul.
Leading into the exhibition, which tracks work made since the 1960s, a series of very tasty small paintings evoke the bog lands in their many moods and hues. It is intriguing to see in the work of Noel Sheridan, Maria Simonds-Gooding, Veronica Bolay, Patrick Collins, Camille Souter and Seán McSweeney how such an extraordinary and abstract landscape lends itself to abstraction in imagination and paint. But Ireland’s bogs aren’t simply repositories for our collective unconsciousness or calls to abstractions in art. They are also huge carbon stores.
In Patrick Hough’s film The Black River of Herself, from 2021, an archaeologist holds a conversation with a bog body, in which the body tells how she was sacrificed millenniums ago for good weather. Initially, a subtle inflection seems to imply the naive barbarism of such an act, yet now, she reminds us, we are sacrificing the bogs themselves.
This is an act as destructive to humanity as her own individual sacrifice, yet on a far greater scale, as carbon is released, and climates collapse. Alongside epic scenes of the sheer beauty of the bog lands, Hough manages a nicely judged low-key contrast between the preservative powers of the bog and the incredibly complex requirements of science to stabilise the body’s exhumed remains.
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A well-judged group show can amplify the work of an individual work, leading to connections and sums that are even greater than the parts, however impressive those individual parts may already be. Fiona McDonald and Siobhán McDonald have separately worked with University College Dublin’s Parity Studios, a programme that connects artists with its research departments.
Siobhán McDonald explores the preservative power of the bogs, and with it the erosions of meaning and understanding that take place over the passage of millenniums in a way that acquires more meaning having seen Hough’s film first.
Beside this, in her A Library of Smells (2023-25), the fragile aromas of bog life are held by samples of earth and plants in old-fashioned scientific containers. Visitors are invited to sniff, although a distance barrier may make this a bit of a feat for some.
The pungency of the aromas has diminished somewhat over time, but this acquires a potency of its own in relation to Fiona McDonald’s We Share the Same Air [1.1] (2025). Here, a series of networked chambers sit on the gallery floor. Sphagnum moss and peat are monitored, their carbon and oxygen emissions tracked, as they respond to their own conditions and to the air in the gallery. Taken in relation to the fading scents, the work serves as a reminder of how our air is full of its own invisible complexities and reminds us of the natural balances that support life, and their capacity to destroy it too.
Around this, large-scale photographs by Tina Claffey, Amelia Stein and Shane Hynan offer a series of perspectives. Among Europe’s oldest ecosystems, Ireland’s raised bogs are home to many rare and delicate yet vital networks of flora and fauna.
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Claffey’s images magnify hidden beauties, such as the iridescent carapace of the birch shieldbug, the feathers of sphagnum moss and the almost alien nature of the sundew.
Then Stein gives us the monumental aspect of the bogs in intense black-and-white images. Her sacks of hand-cut turf and piles of peat sods look like sculptures, elegies for a seemingly lost past that is actually still only in the infancy of its death throes.
Between these, Hynan’s scenes of the now abandoned Bord na Móna peat factories riff off Bernd and Hilla Becher’s seminal photographs of dying industrial architecture in the 1970s. A closer look at Hynan’s captions reveal that burning turf in power stations ceased as recently as 2023.
Through this, an interesting shift takes place. The bog “is a sort of coiled energy, a place where nature has gone to take refuge. Or to wait,” Colm Tóibín writes in the exhibition catalogue. When artworks really work, ideas emerge in the mind; here the synergies of images give rise to the understanding that, thanks to the bogs, even if, or when, we cause our own extinction, life will continue. Just not ours.
Throughout the exhibition, Irish bogs prove so rich in ideas that you might find yourself wishing for more, or at least an extension of what is already there. Brian O’Doherty’s Rick (1975) and Tom de Paor’s subsequent N3 (2000) are represented by a pair of small panels with photographs describing the twin structures built from cut turf.
“With increased awareness as to the preciousness of our bogs the cutting of turf has become prescribed, its sale illegal,” the O’Doherty text reads. “A work such as this can only be reproduced as documentation.”
The explanation may be accurate, but it feels thin, avoiding the heated feelings on both sides of the political debates about ownership of the land, the rights felt to be conferred by tradition, and the adjacent loss of an entire way of life within some communities, where turf cutting in special areas of conservation is also illegal.
While wishing for more overt politics in BogSkin, I also find myself yearning for an exhibition three times the size, so much ground is there to cover. BogSkin confines itself to the work of Irish artists, although Tóibín references Joseph Beuys’s work, citing the iconic Irish Energies – a pound of butter sandwiched between two peat briquettes.
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Deftly unpacking the elements of this, Tóibín describes the work’s telling of “an odd truth: the lure of land that gave butter made Ireland an attractive place for outsiders who thought nothing of the peatlands. And then, both briquettes and butter became part of consumer culture, the old-fashioned turf made shiny and modern, the butter packaged for export. Welcome home, Kerrygold.”
These disconnects haunt works such as Robert Ballagh’s Bogman, a self-portrait of the artist excavating his own layers, along with the land; and while cutting does continue, despite the ban, on early winter evenings, parts of Ireland will never smell the same again. Once again, tradition ends up paying the price for cynical, profit-driven practices and overexploitation. The profit of the few outweighs the needs of the many, and suddenly systems that functioned gently for centuries have become insupportable.
As Patrick Murphy points out in his preface to the exhibition catalogue, the work on show “chronicles more than just our change of values regarding bog lands, it also touches on the changes of epoch to the Anthropocene”. What is tradition if tradition may kill us in the end?
“Every layer they strip / Seems camped on before”, Heaney writes at the end of his 1969 poem Bogland. “The wet centre is bottomless.” So too, it seems, is the wealth of work that explores the bog. The climate crisis has allowed space for the rural in Dublin’s galleries, and its urgencies have banished much of the Paul Henry-style romanticism that lingered over views of rural Ireland in art for more than a century.
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It has been an odd and artificial divide in a country as small as this one. Boggers and rednecks as a separate tribe seem ludicrous, especially when looked through Laura Fitzgerald’s wittily abstract lens. Mrs Nolan (She Runs a B&B Now) is a patch of cultivated land in the dark bog – or, more possibly, the pink labial lips of a sheela-na-gig, another emblem of all that repressed fecundity.
Artists have been exploring these themes long before the anxieties of urban curators caught up. Nigel Rolfe’s Into the Mire (2012) catches this perfectly, his crisp white-shirted figure falling endlessly into the bog, groping his way out, only to fall again, and again. As Tóibín writes, “What is held in the bog does not decay. It does not haunt us because it is not dead.” We can put on the civilised suit but, we may also entirely alienate ourselves, from ourselves and our environment, in making the attempt.
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If you’re inspired by such ideas you should visit Lough Boora, in Co Offaly, where Sculpture in the Parklands was originally initiated by Kevin O’Dwyer with Bord na Móna. This vast land-art and sculpture park is on a former cutaway bog – “cutaway” being the term for a bog where all the commercial peat has been extracted. It ought to be world famous, and I suspect that in almost any other country it would be.
Bogskin is at the RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin, until Sunday, April 20th. A version of the exhibition is at Esker Arts, Tullamore, Co Offaly, from May 10th until June 28th
