About
The team at Void Art Centre are delighted to invite you to the launch of Pollanroe Burn, an exhibition by artist Emily McFarland, opening on Saturday 27 September 2025, from 6-8pm.
Pollanroe Burn or An Pollán Rua – the little red pool – unfolds through a series of new films and archival fragments, forming part of Emily's ongoing long-term research into the shifting ecology of the Sperrin Mountains of West Tyrone, in the North of Ireland, in the shadow of proposed major industrial-scale gold extraction.
New film works, shot on 16mm and employing documentary forms, choreographed sequences, and sonic compositions, conjure speculative transformations that trace intersecting, submerged deep-time narratives: a watercourse within the Foyle Catchment, the remnants of an ancient Scots pine forest preserved in a former commercially harvested peat bog, and a singular cloudberry rhizome growing on a mountain in West Tyrone – the only recorded occurrence of the plant on the island of Ireland.
Attending to interconnected hydrological and vegetal worlds as agents of bioregional collective memory, folk knowledge, language and resistance, the works open space for slow looking, respectful listening and imagining relations to non-human life beyond the anthropocentric frame. In dialogue with the principles of Earth Jurisprudence – the legal philosophy recognising inherent rights of ecosystems on par with human rights – the project considers land and the watercourse not only as vulnerable to extraction and erasure, but also as sites of resilience, testimony, agency, refusal and rights.
The Sperrin Mountains of West Tyrone have long been targeted by international gold mining interests and in the late 1990s, efforts to attract international mineral prospecting across the region culminated in the launch of the Tellus Project. Its stated aim was to enhance mineral exploration by collecting and disseminating regional geoscientific data, revealing significant gold mineralization across the northwest region of the North of Ireland, particularly in the Cavanacaw and Curraghinalt areas. By 2022, over a quarter of the land had been licensed under mining concessions.
Against this backdrop, the project asks: How can we cultivate modes of thinking that allow both intellect and empathy to apprehend the long-standing and delicate connections between humans and their environments? And is it possible to conceive of the river and other similar non-human entities as active, rights bearing presences?
With special thanks to Ulster Wildlife at An Creagán, the National Herbarium in Dublin and Save our Sperrins. This project is funded by Arts Council Northern Ireland, Foundation Foundation and Good Relations Grant.
