Bog Bothy Project (2023-2025)

I was commissioned as an Embedded Photographer on Irish Architecture Foundation (IAF) and 12th Fields Bog Bothy Project funded by Creative Ireland’s Creative Climate Action programme.

This project explored how architecture can help us understand and engage with the complex, changing realities of Ireland’s boglands. Framed through the presence of the Bog Bothy, we ask what it means to inhabit, maintain, and care for these landscapes into the future.

Extract from ‘Building on Bogs’ article by IAF Director Emmett Scanlon 

“For the last few years we have also been working with artists, first Shane Hynan and now Luke Casserly. Their ongoing work with us and in their own ‘bog practice’ has further nourished our work and drawn both IAF and 12th Field deeper into the bog landscape and its communities.

It is not so much that cameras don’t lie – more that, in the right hands, they reveal things you would not otherwise see. Each one of Hynan’s photographs is moving back and forth through time, pulling the history of place into the right now, and drawing any divisive future plans into real and present conversations about the challenges of what it means to be of, live in, and act with a landscape as complex as a bog.”

Details of exhibitions and events that I took part in during my time working with the Bog Bothy Project Team are noted below:

• Bog Bothy project launch event at Clara, Co. Offaly (June 2025)

• Bog Bothy project Panel Discussion at Clara Bog, Offaly (20th June 2025)

• Bog Bothy project events and exhibitions at Clara & Girley Bog (June & August 2025)

• IAF Director Emmett Scanlon on RTE Radio One, Sunday Miscellany, Writing the Bog Part 1 (7thSeptember 2025)

Further text written by the Irish Architecture Foundation regarding my involvement included below.

“The Bothy shelter is not the only new work arising from the Bog Bothy project. Photographer Shane Hynan has been embedded in the project from the beginning, going with 12th Field to visit the peatlands, their existing structures and communities.

Shane's photographs feature in the outdoors exhibitions that surround the Bothy and place it within the unique contexts of the vernacular and industrial architecture, ecology, and social life of the peatlands. Drawings by 12th Field give further insights into their design inspiration and socially engaged research and development process.”

Images taken by me during the project include site visits to Clara bog, Lemanaghan Bog, Cloontuskert, Mount Dillon Bog Group and a weekend workshop at the Common Knowledge Centre in Co. Clare to build a prototype Bothy. The Bothy Tour to Clara Bog (Offaly) and Girley Bog (Meath) and associated events were also part of the work. Some sample images from the commission are included here.

The Bog Bothy project is a #CreativeClimateAction project, funded by @creativeireland. The Bog Bothy tour, exhibition, and events programme are additionally funded by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, @offalycountycouncil, @meathcoco, and @theheritagecouncil.