By Accident or Design

 

The Artist Residency programme By Accident or Design invites poets, artists, and researchers to immerse themselves in the unique habitats of the Cornafulla Micro Reserve. Through deep observation, reflection, and creative engagement with the site’s ecology, participants will develop new work inspired by a landscape shaped by industrial peat extraction and ongoing ecological change. With neither a stable past nor future, the bog defies fixed understanding. Here, knowledge is provisional and ever-evolving, and participants are invited to work within this uncertainty. Every act of observation, creation, and research contributes to the bog’s ongoing transformation—making it clear that the bog is not a subject to be understood, but a living condition that challenges the very process of knowing and questions the limits of certainty.

Current Participants

Mel MacGiobúin / Mael Coll Rua Mel MacGiobúin is a Dublin-based poet and Irish speaker. He writes and perforrms under the nom de plume Mael Coll Rua. His work is included in The Great Book of Ireland, an anthology of modern Irish art and poetry. He performed widely during the 1980s and 1990s. His work has been included in a number of anthologies and a number of chapbooks. In recent years, Mel has given readings as part of the 1916 Performance Arts Club, the Fighting Words creative workshops at Croke Park and has taken part in multi-media performance events, most recently at Common Ground, Bray, Co Wicklow. He is currently creating new written and performance works.

Sundew - Drúchtín móna

Tiny red & yellow plant catches my eye on the verge of
Cornafulla (Corr na fola)

in the rough patch of scutch, I squat down, getting a
closer look

A clutch of small spreading red stems with multi-headed
rosette and petals

No, mouths with tiny glistening hair-thin teeth open to
the light between the shade of grass blades

Aghast at the world or patient and awaiting morsels
to drop from the sky

Tongue-red landing pad just big enough for annoying
persistent buzzing midges.

That patrol in the half-lights of the day by the millions,
all across the hundreds of acres of this boggy landscape

Awaiting as one Corrmhíol* drops, catching a sweet
whiff of aroma floating above the juicy tempting surface

Irresistible - stuck now, the midge’s legs glued The
more they move the more the sticky stuck grabs the legs

Then suck, caught in these primitive traps, the Sundew,

Drúchtín móna, Turf dewdrop, Drosera, Lustwort,
Cailís Mhuireann

A spongy holy grail Names laid over like the compressed
layers of sphagnum moss & decades, centuries

of seasonal decay - plants, otter pelt strip, Bog butter,
bronze armlets, torn scrap of leather book-cover

Chipped spear tip Tochair planks Elk antlers gnarly long
lengths of oak bark

The fine skeletons of chirping larks, snipes. crakes and
sonar hunting bats

buried stone temples & tombs of lost gods, Esker glacial
'till & erratics of retreating blue ice-sheets,

Down down to the hard pan of impenetrable clays on
top of sea-bedded limestones, once swampy bogs too

Lithified, raised, exposed, scraped, crushed crustaceans
weird & extinct crinoids, ammonites, trilobites

Over & over one creature's beauty is another’s
executioner is another’s life-saving meal

Sundew of Cornafulla a dangerous joy

*Corrmhiol - Midge