Catriona Leahy: Midleton artist digs deep for meaning in our boglands 

“All my research at the moment centres on that area,” says Leahy. “I’m looking at how photography, and specifically analogue photography and darkroom photography, can be a kind of metaphor for the bog.

“Karin Sanders, who has written a beautiful book called Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination, describes the bog as nature’s own darkroom. It has these similarities to photography, in that it holds things in a state of suspension until such time as they’re exposed to the air, and then they undergo a kind of irreversible transformation. The same can be said of the photographic process. When we capture an image, it’s held within the black box of the camera, in this very precarious state, until such time as it’s developed in the darkroom and made safe again.”

Leahy describes herself as an “imposter photographer.” A native of Midleton, Co Cork, she studied Fine Art at the Crawford College of Art & Design in Cork city, where she mostly focused on printmaking. “But my approach was quite experimental,” she says, “and it did almost always involve some form of photography. I went on to do an MA in print at the Royal College of Art in London. At the RCA, there’s a very expansive notion of what print can be, and I ended up doing a video installation for my MA show.” 

She stayed on in London for some years. “I had a studio in east London, and I worked in higher education as a lecturer in print at the University of Northampton. I moved back to Ireland in 2018, and got a job in the print department at the National College of Art and Design. My husband is from Maynooth, and that’s where we’ve settled.”

It was around that time that she began to take a serious interest in analogue photography. “An artist named Catherine Kelly had gifted me this medium format camera just before I left for London, but I didn’t use it until we moved back to Maynooth. I already had an interest in how landscapes have been impacted by human activity, and then, because of my proximity to the Midlands and the bog, I decided to make work there with the medium format camera. I quickly realised the connection with the bog as this kind of darkroom in itself.”

Leahy mostly works on the Bord na Móna peatlands at Derrygreenagh, Co Offaly. “The bogs are eerie places,” she says. “They’re beautiful, but there’s something sad and melancholy about them as well. Visiting in the different seasons of the year made me realise there’s a whole other sense of time in the bog. I suppose this comes out of the reading I’ve done around the subject, not just of the bog, but of how we, in our extraction of the earth, have actually penetrated deep time, we have come into contact with the deep past.”

Like Heaney, she has come to think of the bog as “a huge archive, a repository of memory. It harbours a lot of mythologies and histories and traumas, of our own colonial past, and the tensions that arise out of that.” Leahy describes how her work begins with “taking quite conventional photographs, standing on the bog with my tripod and camera. 

“Where I’ve been working is still in the process of extraction. They’ve unearthed bog pine and bog oak, and a lot of that wood is just strewn across the landscape. The roots and branches read like bones or carcasses, particularly because I work in black and white.” 

She develops her negatives at the Photo Museum in Temple Bar, and sometimes at a large format darkroom in London, and then works on them further in her studio, at the Fire Station in Dublin city centre. “I’ll cut and collage the images,” she says. “I’m enacting a similar kind of violence on the negatives as has been enacted on the landscape itself through the process of extraction. So the negatives read as fragments and sections of a landscape, they have this map-like quality.” Leahy has had some extraordinary experiences in the bogs. 

“I’ve come across strange phenomena I can’t explain,” she says. “One day, walking by the old train tracks that they used to transport the peat, I discovered a whole load of snail shells. Some were broken, and more were completely intact, but they had all been emptied out. They had amazing colours, and were really beautiful. I was astonished. I was just, like, what’s the story here? The only thing I can imagine is that some clever bird had brought the shells to the metal track to crack them open and extract the flesh.” 

Leahy is currently preparing for a solo exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin in November, and a group exhibition that same month at the Tulca Festival in Galway. “The working title for my solo show is Nature’s Own Darkroom; I’ll mainly be showing large format, hand-printed, analogue photographs. Michelle Horgan is curating the show in Galway, under the title The Salvage Agency. I’ll be exhibiting a series of digital works at that, three lightboxes where the images are derived from 3D scanning in the bogs.” 

Having spent so much time in the boglands, Leahy has inevitably thought deeply about the consequences of peat extraction and its impact on the environment. “I suppose the sad reality is that there is no going back,” she says. “You can’t restore thousands of years of bog that has been extracted in a mere few decades.” 

In recent years, Bord na Móna has been erecting wind turbines on some of its exhausted peatlands. For all that they contribute to green energy, many environmentalists decry the turbines as unsightly and dangerous to wildlife.

“But you can pick holes in anything, can’t you?” says Leahy. “The thing is, we have to do something. I think sustainability is the key. Sustainability and living within our means. But I don’t know if that’s possible in our capitalist, neoliberal society, not unless there’s a massive, massive mind shift in terms of how we think about our needs.” 

• Groundwork runs at the Glucksman Gallery, UCC until November 3. 
• Further information: glucksman.org; catrionaleahy.com