Niamh is an Irish artist who completed an MA in multidisciplinary Printmaking at the University of the West of England (2019). Niamh currently works as a Research Associate at the Centre for Print Research and is studying towards her PhD. Her practice is concerned with relationships between the human/bodily and other-than-human. Her work is grounded in fieldwork, interdisciplinary collaboration and an experimental print and photography practice. Through her practice and research, she investigates the possibilities and capacity for the print artist to inhabit tensions emerging from the perceived boundaries between the body and landscape.
Niamh recently created a body of work in collaboration with environmental scientist Dr. Gillian Clayton. The project Slow violence and River Abuse: The Hidden Effect of Land Use on Water Quality was awarded through the UWE HAS/ACE connecting research scheme 2021-2022 and was developed to research the relationship between land use and aquatic health. Through this project Niamh and Gillian explored innovative possibilities of the print artist and environmental scientist to create a new collaborative environmentalism that responds to declining water quality in local landscapes.
The project focused on drainage ditches, commonplace in agricultural landscapes. Interested in the extensive amount of duckweed algae found, we monitored its fluctuations, recorded images, took water samples throughout the year. Several traditional and experimental print processes were used to create printed outcomes that respond to the specificity of the water bodies investigated and the initial findings gathered through fieldwork and lab analysis. The work was informed by the collaborative process of fieldwork and knowledge exchange and generated through the process of microscopy, lithography, anthoypes, photographic printing and etching.
