Residencies to unite art, science, and community in Galway’s ‘The Air We Share’ climate action initiative
Galway Arts Centre, in conjunction with Galway City Council, today (25.11.24) announced the awarding of three art commissions under an innovative new artist-in-residence programme. The programme supports artists to engage with the communities of Galway City’s Westside and to creatively respond to scientific research on air quality and climate conducted by local citizens and climate scientists from the University of Galway.
The artist-in-residence programme lies at the creative heart of ‘The Air We Share’, a collaborative climate action initiative launched in July 2024. The initiative examines and highlights the causes, impacts, and potential solutions to air pollution. Through artistic interventions, citizen science, and community action in Galway’s Westside, it aims to deepen public understanding of air and its critical role in our shared environment.
Aligned with these objectives, the selected artists have been commissioned to develop innovative and collaborative arts projects that interpret and respond to scientific concepts and data on air quality, the atmosphere, and climate. They have been awarded funding to develop their projects between now and July 2025, when the final artworks will be presented publicly.
The selected artists are:
- Leon Butler: Galway-based artist Leon Butler’s project Phosphene blends art and technology to transform air quality data into a community experience. By using sensors to track and interpret this data, Butler will create “data sculptures” that reveal the health of Galway’s built environment in new ways. The project invites the local community to participate in design sessions to shape how air data is visualised, making the often-invisible aspects of air quality engaging and accessible to all.
- Christopher Steenson: Multidisciplinary artist Christopher Steenson’s project I talk to the wind explores air pollution through the act of breathing. His work will incorporate sound walks using live air pollution data and community workshops that consider climate futures through writing and discussion. Drawing on Galway’s air quality data, insights from scientists, and ideas generated through community workshops, Steenson’s project will connect participants with the realities of air pollution and its impacts on daily life through the shared experience of breath.
- a place of their own (Paula McCloskey and Sam Vardy): Art and spatial practice ‘a place of their own’ envisions Galway in 2054, where communities of insects, dust, microbes, and other “air dwellers” draft a new set of rights for the air: The 9 Freedoms for the Air. This project explores the knowledge and stories of microscopic communities in our atmosphere and builds a speculative future scenario in Galway. Through workshops, local residents will join scientists and environmental legal experts to create a collective textile artwork that reimagines air as a shared resource deserving of protection.
‘The Air We Share’ brings together a consortium of local partners, which is led by Galway City Council and includes Galway Arts Centre, the University of Galway’s Centre for Creative Technologies, Centre for Climate and Air Pollution Studies, and Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics, Westside Resource Centre, and Galway Culture Company. During their residencies, artists will have access to the facilities, support and resources of Galway Arts Centre, University of Galway, and Westside Resource Centre.
Director and Curator of Galway Arts Centre, Megs Morley, commented: “After a highly competitive open call selection process, we are thrilled to announce the artists chosen for ‘The Air We Share’ artist-in-residence programme. In the context of the current climate challenges that we face as a society, programmes such as ‘The Air We Share’ that bring together artists, scientists, communities, public institutions and cultural organisations are critical to our understanding and addressing the issues at hand.
“The selected artists bring an exceptional wealth of artistic experience to ‘The Air We Share’ programme. Over the coming months, they will develop engaging interdisciplinary projects that explore innovative ways of understanding the sources and effects of air pollution, as well as the actions we can take to catalyse positive collective change.”
Chief Executive of Galway City Council, Leonard Cleary added: “The artist-in-residence programme brings creativity into the heart of ‘The Air We Share’, a transformative climate action initiative guided by the theme ‘Making the Invisible Visible’, which highlights air pollution as a critical environmental health risk.
“Working alongside the EU’s Net Zero Cities initiative, ‘The Air We Share’ helps inform Galway City Council’s climate policies and, through community involvement, aims to inspire cultural and behavioural shifts towards climate action grounded in fairness, collaboration, and positive change. As the project’s lead partner, we are delighted to support the artists in developing community-engaging interventions and look forward to their creative responses next summer.”
‘The Air We Share’ is a recipient of the Creative Climate Action Fund, an initiative of the Creative Ireland Programme, funded by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media in collaboration with the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. The fund supports creative, cultural and artistic projects that build awareness around climate change and empower citizens to make meaningful behavioural transformations.
For further information, visit theairweshare.ie.
About the artists:
- Leon Butler is an artist, designer, and educator based in Galway City working at the intersection of art and technology. His work has been recognised by The Type Directors Club, 100 Archive, the Future Makers awards, Digital Media awards, Young Directors Awards, and the Irish Design Awards. In 2022, Leon was a Selected Artist of the European Media Arts platform 2022 with RIXC Centre for New Media Culture, Riga. His work Performance Surveillance premiered at the Biennale WRO in Wrocław in May 2023, before showing at NEME, Cyprus in June 2023, and in a solo show at RIXC, Center for New Media Art, Latvia, from July to September. Leon’s latest work is Dwelling, an XR dance performance and installation, which premiered as part of the Beta Festival in Dublin in November 2023 and showed as part of the Galway Film Fleadh 2024.
- With a practice that spans sound, lens-based media, text and digital systems, Christopher Steenson’s (b.1992, Northern Ireland) work bridges historical and speculative narratives to interrogate the politics of time, environment, and more-than-human-relations. Through these concerns, he creates artworks through which we can ‘listen to the future’. Recent presentations include The Sky is Falling!, Ormston House, Limerick (2024); mother tongue, The MAC, Belfast (2024); inching towards, Freelands Foundation, London (2024); Penumbra, LAVA, Mexico City (2024); Breath Variations, Flat Time House, London (2023); Soft Rains Will Come, VISUAL Carlow (2022); TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: The World Was All Before Them (2022). In 2020, Steenson presented On Chorus, a national public sound artwork utilising Ireland’s network of train station PA systems to broadcast field recordings of birdsong across Ireland. His work is held in the Arts Council of Ireland Collection, and he has participated in several national and international residencies, including Bemis Centre for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, USA (2023) and Sounding Paths, Syros, Greece (2019).
- a place of their own is an art & spatial practice founded in 2010 by Paula McCloskey and Sam Vardy. Their projects are co-inquiries with diverse collaborators, investigating the geopolitics of air, wetlands, nation-state borders, extraction, and kinship through an intersectional, anticolonial & feminist praxis. Core to their method are practices of fictioning (e.g. myth-making & science fictioning), through which they co-produce site-responsive performances, sculptures, and installations. They explored new imaginaries of wetlands in Wet/Land/Dwellers, Sheffield, UK (2022) as part of Arts Catalyst, the UK’s Emergent Ecologies Programme, and in Myths for a Wetlands Imaginary, London (2020), producing sculpture, films, sound work, performances, a collective zine. They have also produced significant work on nation-state borders, specifically in Ireland, developing the concept ‘Border Fictioning/s’ through their project Eile (2016-present), which has led to films, performances, sculptures, publications, and exhibitions. They are currently working on A Digital Counter Cartography of the Border in Ireland 1968-1998, (2021-present) funded by the BA/Leverhulme Trust.
