Monettia Bog, Ballinvalley, Killeigh, Co Offaly Image: Ann Lawlor

This week our featured Wilderness Thinker is Ann Lawlor a curator, programmer and producer of art projects. Ann is a walker of boglands. It is in her coding, peat horizons meeting rain bladdered clouds, turf burning of damp heat, astringent smoked eyes, the spongy terrain that keeps secrets and embalms truths.

There are a number of strands that are prodded at, as Ann meanders from wilderness as a social construct, rebranded and packaged for human consumption, to the mythology of ‘bogs’ and how their membrane is both natural and cultural. Biomimicry, botany and plant mechanisms are considered to the impact of bogs on climate change and how the positive and negative are part of the bog’s living legacy. 

The bog is her anthropomorphic deity, she is grafting technical and scientific language to expand the potential of the bog’s narrative. The style of the first person narrator externalises a silent monologue – dramatic, unreliable and imagined. Ann’s appropriation of this type of language (that has been constructed through observing the natural world) is being used very loosely and often times incorrectly – its reapplication is more in sentiment than meaning… Read More