Grassroots climate action driven by bold artistic endeavour

Even on the warmest west of Ireland days, there’s always a windy gap at a sports event where a geansaí or jumper is essential. For so many spectators, supporting a local team is a test of good circulation, and the quality of one’s anorak.

Living in An Cheathrú Rua (Carraroe) in south Connemara, where GAA is a part of daily vocabulary, artist, dancer and curator Ríonach Ní Néill appreciates that very well.

“For a lot of the year, the wind can flay your skin,” Ní Néill laughs, as we walk around by Páirc Astro, the astro-turf pitch in An Cheathrú Rua where many a game is held.

Now, however, Páirc Astro is a pitch with a difference. For those who get there early enough on a typical soft rain day, there may be a spot under an energy generating shelter with a heated back support to keep body and soul both warm and dry.

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Named Mo Thóin Theolaí (“my warm bum”), the pitchside shelter generates solar and wind energy to power its lights and heat its “wall”. It was created by Ní Néill, working with engineers Columba Eagleton and Duncan Mathews, artists Aoife and Peter Casby and a local team.

The climate art project is integral to the Baint an Aeir programme, where Ní Néill brought together 12 artists, 13 scientists and the local community to consider how Connemara Gaeltacht’s landscape, traditions and locally managed natural resources might help to realise a decarbonised future.

During the year-long programme, funded by Creative Ireland’s first Creative Climate Action Fund, the project held 26 public events around climate change and biodiversity loss, and commissioned four climate art works.

Among them was Ní Néill’s structure, along with a tidal-powered kinetic sculpture by Paddy Bloomer and a reconstruction of a famine-era “scailp” or shelter by artist Seán Ó Flaithearta.

“I started by talking to the local community in An Cheathrú Rua, and Coiste na Páirce where we have the astro-turf pitch was suggested as a location for something similarly practical,” Ní Néíll says.

“Back in 2018 I ran an engineering and weather workshop with Maeve Duffy and Tony Fegan from Tallaght Community Arts as part of a Galway 2020 project, and we were working with teenagers. They said they would love to be warm and dry when waiting for the bus,” Ní Néíll adds.

“A shelter also appeals to every parent who has had body parts nearly frozen off them watching their kids, and so the idea was to create a little spot that could also encourage a sense of community,” she explains.

“When the weather is bad, people are often in their own cars with the engine on to keep warm, which was another reason to provide a low-impact alternative.”

The structure has an angular roof, shaped by three solar panels and fitted with a small Rutland wind turbine used by sailing boats.

They are using an off-grid hybrid wind and solar renewable energy system, she explains. It comprises solar voltaic panels (PV) with a Rutland 1200 wind turbine and a deep cycle battery.

“I figured since the Rutland turbine has been tried to tested for over 20 years on sailing craft, it should withstand the battering it would get on the west coast.”

On the demand side, an inverter converts the stored DC electricity from the battery to power the heated wall panel and LED lights. The shelter design is based on the dimensions and required pitch of the three solar panels which make up the roof,” she says.

“Solar panels are incredible, but the underside of them is not the most attractive, so we fitted them with coloured polycarbonate which is illuminated by light rope – resembling jelly babies in its effect,” she says.

“I spotted a sheeted side panel in a farm equipment shop in Tuam and I asked Rynn’s Engineering if they could turn it into a heated wall,” Ní Néill recalls.

“Aoife Casby has worked with heated floor mats, so we put in the cables for underfloor heating and covered it in aluminium, and it heats up to 30 degrees. The wind does pull some of that away, but the idea was to provide relative heat compared to outside temperatures, and I have tested this in minus zero,” she says.

Sheep and seals also inspired the concept, Ní Néill says.

“Wherever there are sheep, they are sunbathing on the tarmac on roads or leaning on stone walls in the evening, where they are absorbing heat which the stone takes from the sun. Seals do the same on rocks. So it is kind of mimicking what you see around here.”

Local contractors Tony Tim Ó Conghaile, Peadar Ó Domhnaill, Bertie Folan, Patrick Lynch and Solar Structures worked on installing the sculpture on hard granite. Dotted around it, are assemblages or sculptures made of fishing floats or buoys.

“A friend of mine, Caitríona Ní Chonghaíle, pointed out that when you see floats at sea it is telling the fisherman there is something of value underneath it,” Ní Néíll says. “These floats are doing the same thing. The shelter is in a little wilderness corner of the car park, and the float sculptures are trying to say ‘take a moment, slow down, bend down’, as so much of Irish nature is very tiny and discreet.”

It may look like quite a bare place, but they did a survey with local ecologist Cian Ó Ceallaigh and found 30 plant species, along with frogs and lizards within two hours. During my visit with Ní Néill, the magairlín meidhreach or early purple orchids were in bloom, along with pines, willow, and a beautiful little mountain ash. In September, the entire area is purple with heather.

Ní Néill did work with nature-based landscape architect Roisín Byrne on planting at the “teorainn” or border between the man-made car park and the “nature spot”.

“We were afraid it would just be covered over in scutch grass, so now there’s a selection of native Irish flowers here, graduating from pink to white to pink again over the summer,” she says.

Also participating in Baint an Aeir were Aran island artist Seán Ó Flaithearta, who made a temporary shelter named “An Scailp” with Marcus MacConghail. Their interactive installation of art, sound and climate encouraged visitors to “imagine, react and reflect on the climate crisis and what we have to do to protect ourselves in the future”.

Artist and inventor Paddy Bloomer, based in Ballynahinch, Co Down, made his tidal-powered catamaran out of recycled materials, as is his wont. Bloomer, who started out studying engineering before he switched to fine and applied art at the University of Ulster, is known for his “Professor Branestawm” approach to art.

He has exhibited at summer festivals in Ireland, Glastonbury and beyond, and one of his best known works was the Bin Boat, made with Nicholas Keogh, which was part of Northern Ireland’s entry for the 2005 Venice Biennale.

For his Baint an Aeir sculpture, he wanted to merge traditional boat building skills with the idea of renewable energy as a community, rather than big business endeavour.

“I gathered up some old wind turbine blades that had been scrapped, and which I tested on Lough Neagh to see if they would float, and then left Co Down for An Cheathrú Rua with a vanload of bits and pieces and teamed up with a local men’s shed group,” he says.

As tidal energy is still not exploited to the level that wind is, it holds a fascination for “armchair inventors”, he adds, and he aimed to “take the armchair to sea and experiment with home brew tidal turbines”. The boat was built from two wind turbine blades, holding a kinetic sculpture based on the movements of celestial bodies.

“It became known as the Moon Boat, and I had it in Galway city twice on the Claddagh basin, and floated it on Greatman’s Bay, Coral Strand and Bealadangan in Connemara – and then recently took it to Rathlin Island,” Bloomer says.

Both Bloomer and Ní Néill know they can’t solve the climate crisis, but their work, and that of other artists, aims to start a conversation.

“I firmly believe you can learn a lot from your traditions and bring them with you into new situations, such as how to create a decarbonised future,” she says.

“I very strongly think everybody has a role. The scale of the crisis is so huge that it is like a war effort, and every aspect of life needs to be climate-proofed and decarbonised.

“ As an artist, there is that concept of us trying to think the impossible, and make the impossible and think about the things that are uncomfortable too – what we spend most of our time doing anyway. And there is that aspect of the artist as fool or jester, taking the risks that other people can’t and inhabiting that space.”