Ecologies Art Lab Exhibition Event

Land + Collaboration

MTU Gallery at 46 Grand Parade, Cork City T12 VN56

The Ecologies Art Lab (E.A.L.) will launch its new Learning Community with Land + Collaboration, an exhibition taking place at the MTU Gallery, Grand Parade, Cork, from April 14–18, 2026. Bringing together national and international artists and researchers, the exhibition foregrounds artistic research as a collaborative and ecological practice, exploring the relationships between land, materials, and collective inquiry.

E.A.L. is an evolving community of artist-researchers investigating the intersections of ecology, land, artistic practice, and material transformation. Situated within the MTU Faculty of Creative and Performing Arts and Media at Crawford College of Art & Design, the Lab engages deeply with eco-perspectives, turning attention to overlooked materials, embodied processes, and site-responsive thinking.

Land + Collaboration gathers multiple artistic intelligences into a shared field of inquiry. The exhibition positions exhibition-making itself as an expanded form of publishing, a public iteration of artistic research where processes, propositions, and experiments are made visible and accessible.

A central feature of the exhibition is a series of Radical Posters created by the seven members of E.A.L., alongside fifteen invited contributions from national and international artist-researchers. 

These posters function simultaneously as visual artworks and research articulations. Presented as two-dimensional works, they may combine image, text, diagrams, annotation, mapping, or scores, offering a dynamic format for communicating artistic research.

Alongside the posters, the exhibition will present documentation, experimental outcomes, and objects emerging from a range of Ecologies Art Lab projects. These materials reveal the processes, material investigations, and collaborative experiments that underpin the Lab’s work, highlighting artistic research as a living, evolving practice.

The Ecologies Art Lab Learning Community is composed of CPAM Faculty members Collette Nolan, Catherine Hehir, Conall Cary, Marilyn Lennon, Fiona Kelly, Colette Lewis, and Helle Helsner. Together, they develop shared methodologies that connect artistic practice with ecological awareness, collective learning, and material experimentation.

The Ecologies Art Lab website is currently being updated in preparation for the launch, and a link will be shared shortly.