From the ground, ruined by centuries
Discoveries are curated.
RUIN finds and reveals a collection of one-of-one pieces recovered from Irish boglands and places of ruin. Each is cleaned, worked, scraped, conserved and catalogued before being presented for release.
Behind the collection are the benches, the machines, the material and the landscapes from which these pieces emerged. What follows is the slow work of bringing each Discovery back into the light, revealing what has survived and giving form once more to something that had lain dormant for centuries.
The Workshop
A dedicated room of dust and tools. Bench, vice, chisels kept sharp, machinery which is used sparingly - by hand the pieces emerge. The discoveries are held here for months. The wood dries, moves, splits and as it is set aside to settle. Nothing is hurried toward finish; most of what happens in this room is waiting, and watching what the material decides to do.
The Material
Bog wood ranging from scotts pine to oak, reclaimed timber and weathered wood taken from buildings that have already failed and fallen to ruin. Material that carries a record and a story before it is ever touched by hands once more.
Age is stated only as estimates for now. Where a piece is dated, the method is recorded. Nothing is aged artificially and nothing is described as older than the evidence allows. Radio Carbon dating is planned, but the pieces from the bog land range from 400 years old (the ulster plantations and the removal of the woods and forest) to 4,000 years old, the early settlers on the island - a mystical time of pagan druids and hardship.
At times, other materials are used to help the piece back to life. Danish oil and Beeswax are favoured for the beauty they find in preserving wood and entering the grain. Stone, steel and pigments are used sparingly. The wood is the main event always.
The Bog
The Irish blanket bog. Ancient forests fell into it. What is lifted out now is the residue of that collapse, preserved by the same conditions that should have destroyed it. Ireland’s bogs are accumulations of time. Layer upon layer of decayed vegetation, built over thousands of years in waterlogged ground. Blanket bog spread across much of the landscape around 4,000 years ago. Cool. Wet. Relentless. Ireland and Britain hold a significant share of what remains. Human hands altered it too. Woodland was cleared. Less water was drawn from the soil. The ground grew wetter. Decay slowed. At Céide Fields in County Mayo, Neolithic field systems around 5,000 years old now lie beneath peat up to four metres deep. Later clearances stripped more woodland from the landscape. The bog kept what the surface lost. Pollen. Seeds. Timber. Trackways. Fragments of vanished environments. Wood can remain buried for centuries and millennia. Cold, starved of oxygen, preserved.
The Process
Recovery is unceremonious: wet, heavy, black earth clinging. Much is lost in the curing and cleaning. What remains becomes the discovery and collection. Cleaning, cleaving, burning, oiling, waxing. Resin for stabilising a void. Steel and mounting when a work needs to stand once more.
Roughness is kept. Splits, checks, insect track and mineral staining are left legible rather than sanded away — the damage is the record, the ruin is the beauty and removing it would remove its story.
In progress
In the Making
An occasional glimpse of work not yet catalogued.
Evolution
A root section lifted in May and months into curing and drying. I see an ancient creature, the first to start crawling onto land to explore. Many eyes, many animals. I have a thick solid oak slab i am fashioning as a rocky shore for it to climb onto.
Curator Access
The catalogue is maintained privately.
Enter the back room