Curated by Clara McSweeney, The Rain Tells Us Everything investigates the encroaching transformations shaping contemporary landscapes under the pressures of the climate crisis. Through trespassing, tracking, and collective singing, the participating artists examine these shifts across sound, film, fabric, and drawing, each bringing a distinct material and conceptual approach to environmental change.
Wexford based artist Catherine McDonald’s work is deeply research driven. She focuses on microscopic details of specific environments and uses them to rethink the wider global ecosystem. Her practice is grounded in ecological thinking. Not just as the study of nature, but as an understanding of the world as an interconnected network of systems. It recognises the complex web of relations between living things and rejects hierarchical thought. She builds installations from this research, working with sculpture, film, photography and sound. For The Rain Tells Us Everything, she will premiere her short film Where Salt Moves which focuses on the phenomenon of saltwater intrusion (rising sea levels pushing salt into freshwater systems) and highlights its ecological, agricultural, and social impacts on vulnerable landscapes.
Katie Nolan is a visual artist based in County Waterford whose practice engages with ecological awareness, technoculture and the evolving conditions of human perception. Her work critically examines the relationship between humans and technoculture. She is interested in how advances in robotics and artificial intelligence shape our lived experience, posing questions around entropy and negentropy in contemporary systems. Central to her inquiry is the role of haptic perception and human automaticity, with a recurring focus on the human hand as both a biological and technological instrument. Her recent work, Trespass, presented for The Rain Tells Us Everything, investigates the spatial and material realities of Ireland’s data storage industry. Through video and installation, she considers the hidden infrastructures that underpin digital life, drawing attention to their physical presence and environmental implications.
Niamh Schmidtke is an artist, lecturer and arts organiser based across Limerick and London.
Schmidtke explores the politics of green washing through speculation, audio, ceramics and installations, drawing attention to the financial and colonial origins of climate crises. They examine the relationship between listening and speaking, to consider the kinds of voices that deep time, the sea, or humans could have with one another. They will present a body of work developed through the Welcome to the Neighbourhood Residency with Askeaton Contemporary Arts in 2025, which examined Aughinish Alumina a steel processing plant that surrounds Askeaton in Co Limerick.
Whether addressing the expansion of Ireland’s data storage industry onto former fruit farms, wild lands, and forestry; tracing the movement of salt as a catalyst for disruption in freshwater systems from the Arctic to the Philippines; or collectively protesting bauxite waste entering the Shannon Estuary through active song, the artists respond to the unfolding conditions of the Anthropocene with attentiveness, resistance, and care.
The exhibition is curated by Clara McSweeney, an emerging curator and visual artist whose practice focuses on socially engaged projects, overlooked urban and rural spaces, and feminist and ecological concerns. The exhibition is supported by the Regional Cultural Centre and the Arts Council of Ireland.
The Rain Tells Us Everything
Curator Notes
Last summer, a friend loaned me Private Rites by Julia Armfield, a speculative fiction novel set in a perpetually rainy world, where inhabitants are either adapting to or ignoring slow environmental collapse as water pools around them. At that time, I kept thinking about the rain, storms and floods that have intensified here on the island in recent years, which directly influenced my thinking around the curatorial direction of this exhibition. I went in pursuit of artists who were thinking through similar concerns: investigating occurrences that have encroached upon landscapes that are either direct effects of or enabling the climate crisis.
Through the many conversations I had with Katie, Niamh and Catherine, two things became apparent. Firstly, each artist approaches their work through an investigative lens focused on landscapes, communities, or structures that, for the most part, remain largely unseen. Secondly, all three artists are deeply engaged in advocating for these landscapes, communities, and systems being exploited in ways that prioritise economic gain over ecological sustainability.
Katie Nolan’s film Trespass arrived to me by post on a memory stick in late summer 2025, a deliberate choice made by the artist not to upload the work into the vast data-storage systems that most of us use daily, myself included. The body of work, created in 2022 as part of her Masters Degree in Art and Environment, was shortlisted for the RDS Visual Art Awards 2022.
Trespass examines Ireland’s rapidly expanding data-storage industry and the high concentration of data centres across the Irish landscape, while also addressing the seemingly invisible infrastructures of contemporary data use and storage. Currently, in Ireland, there are eighty-nine data centres, with nine at various stages of development and thirty more granted planning permission or under appeal to An Coimisiún Pleanála; making Ireland, with its cooler climate, the data centre capital of the world. [1]
The film traces the artist’s interaction with a family-run organic farm in County Waterford, drawing a parallel with a fruit farm that was destroyed to make way for the data centre now standing at Grange Castle Business Park in Dublin. The work follows Katie as she trespasses not physically, but through remote and digital means. In doing so, she offers us a glimpse into a rarely seen architecture that is beginning to dominate the Irish landscape, which we are all connected to, hoarding our digital junk.
Quoting Katie herself: “Why is our land, our public infrastructure and national grid devoted to multinational digital corporations who make multimillions of dollars while offshoring their energy consumption and carbon emissions onto our island?”
This question has become increasingly urgent due to recent reporting, highlighting the hidden data-centre tax on the Irish public. Investigations by The Guardian suggest the growing electricity demands of these facilities place ever-increasing pressure on the national grid, while contributing to rising energy bills for the Irish public. [2]
Alongside the film, Katie presents a series of fine-lined works on paper and a large-scale ink wall drawing that reflect on the global undersea cable network. Today, undersea cables stretch across the globe, forming the invisible infrastructure that sustains our digital lives. Katie’s drawings trace a number of these systems, including cable routes linking Ireland, the UK, France, the Isle of Man and the road network along the M50 data-centre corridor. Recent threats to these networks have highlighted their extreme vulnerability, revealing how easily global communication could be disrupted, as seen in incidents such as the “accidental” dropping of an anchor by a vessel off the Irish coast, transporting alumina from Limerick’s Aughinish plant to St Petersburg in Russia. [3]
In summary, Katie’s work examines our digital culture as a pharmakon: something that is simultaneously beneficial and harmful. While technology has advanced areas like healthcare, communication, and knowledge sharing, it also carries extremely high environmental consequences. Consequences that place increasing pressure on Ireland’s capacity to meet the 2030 climate targets and respond effectively to the climate crisis.
Returning to Aughinish Alumina, it is a Russian-owned aluminium refinery located near Askeaton in County Limerick that was recently investigated by the Irish Times and the Guardian.[4] The experience of living alongside both the plant and the Shannon estuary became central to artist Niamh Schmidtke’s research during their Welcome to the Neighbourhood residency with Askeaton Contemporary Arts in 2025. [5]
Titled CHANTER this work centres around the idea of collective singing as a means of resistance, emerging in response to the complex realities of living beside the refinery. While speaking with Niamh in their London studio, where lengths of red fabric dyed with iron oxide hung throughout the space, they recalled when they first arrived in Askeaton. It seemed that everyone was singing in the shops, on the streets, and in the pubs. They also noticed the sharp red horizon line formed by the red mud, a byproduct of bauxite processing, dominating the skyline. While developing this work, these memories remained at the forefront of their mind.
Here in the Regional Cultural Centre, the sound work CHANTER reverberates from a corner of the space, making you pause for a moment on the sloped floor. The work features a repeated chorus written by Bernadette Hayes and performed by members of the Inbhar Glen Community Choir, intertwined with verses written by Niamh. Verses that record experiences, including swimming in contaminated water, the long terracotta horizon and singing in protest for the estuary. [6]
When the work was first exhibited in a ruined church in Askeaton in 2025, the singers themselves were enveloped within a spiralling structure of the red iron-oxide-dyed fabric winding round them during the performance. Here in the Regional Cultural Centre, the song weaves its way through the spirals of fabric suspended from above.
The spiral motif, present in both the fabric installation and printed poster, is inspired not only by sound waves but also by Naomi Klein’s essay Surrealism Against Fascism, introduced to me by Niamh. This essay highlights that for those surrealist artists, the spiral became a way of imagining dreamscapes beyond the fascist and communist regimes through which they were living. Borrowing this motif, Niamh repositions a gesture of possibility, suggesting it as a space where we might come together to imagine the world differently.[7]
Embedded within the work is also an invitation to participate in this act of collective protest by taking a page of the song, singing within the space, and then carrying it home to continue singing it elsewhere. As Niamh suggests, the work encourages us to “build your own spirals,” both inside and outside the gallery.
Further information about Aughinish Alumina can be found at https://www.stigmadamages.com/ created by artist Michele Horrigan.
Catherine McDonald’s film Where The Salt Moves, premiering at The Rain Tells Us Everything, investigates saltwater intrusion, an occurrence where saltwater is increasingly spreading into freshwater systems around the world due to the rising temperature of our planet. Sections of the film were shot in 2025 aboard the Rembrandt van Rijn during the Arctic Circle Residency, which travelled from Svalbard to ten degrees below the North Pole. Other sections were filmed in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on Negros in the Philippines.
I first met Catherine online via Zoom while she was travelling through Southeast Asia, gathering footage and dialogue from farmers and researching this slow-moving crisis further. I was drawn to this work as I hadn’t encountered or heard about this creeping crisis impacting many communities across the world.
Not flooding, not wildfires, but salt!
In the film, slow, contemplative shots of the melting Arctic landscape are interwoven with farmers’ personal testimonies and the rice production process, creating a dialogue between vastly different environments linked by the devastating effects of the climate crisis. The sharp, repetitive sounds of production are interwoven with softer water sounds, as the film transitions between single-frame and split-screen compositions.
Also sharing the space with the film are large, high-contrast black-and-white giclée prints that mirror the editing style of the film. Large icy environments mesh together with sun-soaked rice plants, merging these seemingly separate yet deeply connected landscapes through the movement of salt.
During the project, Catherine has worked with several collaborators, including filmmaker David Ian Bickley on the production and Dr Finnian Hartnett, a marine biologist, to provide scientific insight throughout the creation of the work.
Returning to the exhibition title, The Rain Tells Us Everything, it suggests that rain is a revealer. In much the same way, each of these artists are revealers. They allow us to see up close and inside Ireland’s rapidly expanding data storage industry, to imagine a contemporary protest strategy against bauxite waste entering the Shannon Estuary through collective song and enable us to hear firsthand the effects of the movement of salt within freshwater systems.
[1] O’Carroll Conor (2025). Where are all the data centres and why should you care? The Journal, https://investigates.thejournal.ie/data-centres
[2] Carroll Ruth (2026) ‘Hidden data centre tax costing Irish households millions’ The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/28/irish-datacentres-household-bills-electricity
[3] Gallagher Conor (2026) Russia- bound cargo ship seen dropping anchor near subsea cables off Irish coast, The Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2026/03/28/russia-bound-cargo-ship-seen-dropping-anchor-near-subsea-cables-off-irish-coast/
[4] Gallagher Conor (2026) From the Shannon to Siberia: How alumina from a Limerick refinery enters Russia’s weapons supply chain, The Irish Times https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/03/24/from-the-shannon-to-siberia-how-alumina-from-a-limerick-refinery-enters-russias-weapons-supply-chain/
[5] Welcome to the Neighbourhood 2025 https://askeatonarts.comtitledoutcomes/archive/neighbourhood outcomes-2025/
[6] Voices (in order of appearance); Bernadette Hayes, Inbher Glen Community Choir, Monya Riachi, Christopher Clery, Grainne Hassett and Akinsola Lawanson.
[7] Klein Naomi (2025) Surrealism Against Fascism, Equator, https://www.equator.org/articles/surrealism-against-fascism