Print Exchanges Workshop
and Art Exhibit

Creative-Critical Responses
to Extractivist Landscapes

Project Overview

In 2024, Sarah Comyn and Katherine Fama organized the “Print Exchanges” Workshop, which gathered local artists, activists, and academics to respond to global mining and bog landscapes through printmaking. The artworks and writings produced in the workshop were displayed in an art exhibit at at UCD.

The project focused on creative-critical exchange, constellating scholarship, site experiences, and visual representation in order to explore spheres of environmental damage and restoration. More broadly, the project considered the ways in which academic research can reach the wider community and produce creative, active understanding of Irish and global extractivist heritage sites.

Workshop

The Print Exchanges workshop brought together researchers, activists, and archivists to learn the art of gelli printing while reflecting visually on a chosen site of post/extractivism using found and/or recycled materials, texts, and images from their own field of expertise. We considered extractivism broadly: explicit examples of mining or peat bog harvests, and as patterns of removal or sale of communal resources.

The workshop began with an introduction to tools, methods, and examples of gelli printing by mixed-media, Dublin-based artist, Sinéad Lawson. Participants each brought with them experiences of a local or a global site of extraction and monoprinted representations of their chosen sites in past, present, and/or future.

Exhibit

The summer launch of “Print Exchanges” Exhibit by Professor Emilie Pine was both a celebration and catalyst for future discussion, research, and artistic production. The exhibit was curated by Comyn and Fama and hosted by the James Joyce Library. Colleagues from the broader academic and activist communities were excited to consider their own work in the context of the display of creative approaches to research and climate action. The “Print Exchanges” exhibit allowed participants to more fully share the results of the workshop (both material works and new research processes) with their colleagues in community groups, archive settings, scholarly research centres, and mining education sites.

Supported by

The “Print Exchanges” workshop was hosted at the UCD Humanities Institute and supported by a Seed Funding grant from the College of Arts & Humanities. We are grateful to Katherine McSharry, Director of Cultural Heritage at James Joyce, who participated in the workshop and helped install the launch in the Writing Centre and the longer exhibit in the library main entrance, and to Emilie Pine for her continued championing of creative-critical work.

Print Exchanges Workshop and Art Exhibit

Creative-Critical Responses to Extractivist Landscapes