LEER- Landscape, Environment, Ecology, Research, 2021, Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Leitrim.

Exhibiting Research Artists: Kiera O’Toole, Catriona Leahy, Marie Farrington, Padraig Cunningham & Siobhan McGibbon

The Landscape, Ecology & Environment Research Residencies (LEER) is a biannual project initiated at Leitrim Sculpture Centre in 2018. Now in its third rendition the programme provides artists with a wide range of support for the development of new engagements with landscape, ecology and/or environmental contexts and themes and to develop from this work, new directions, approaches and methodologies within their practice.

Each artist works with concepts generated across three research strands: ‘Contexts & Themes’; ‘Sites &Locations’ and ‘Strategies & Methodologies’. These are assembled in research portfolios that accompany the exhibition giving a unique insight into the different processes and orientations of each artist concerningthe wider contexts of landscape, ecology and environment.

https://www.leitrimsculpturecentre.ie/whats-on/exhibitions/leer

O’Toole is an independent artist and practice-based researcher examining how humans experience, and form relationships with, the environment and the everyday. Through her focus on ‘pathic aesthetics’ O’Toole’s site-responsive drawing practice engages the atmospheric, material, temporal and corporeal aspects of sites in developing the work. These pathic responses in all their complexity: diversity, directness, universality and presentness; are evidence of how humans are both subject to, and affected by, the world that surrounds them. By paying close attention to the atmospheres, resonances and material affects immanent to diverse environments O’Toole hopes to create a 'Holding Space' for something intermediate, something in and between us, a space where we can pay attention to the here and now which is always and already happening.