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.
Working from an ecological and systems-based perspective, Catherine McDonald creates immersive installations that merge sculpture, film, sound, and light to probe the relationship between Earth’s material realities and human imagination. Her ongoing research into salt as a marker of environmental disruption—tracing shifting salinity from the Arctic to global marine ecosystems—foregrounds the subtle but profound indicators of planetary change.
Katie Nolan, an artist whose practice spans textiles, video, sound, and socially engaged processes, explores humanity’s entangled relationship with the natural world. Her work often emerges through collaborative making, eco-dyeing, and deep mapping, using foraged materials and community participation to reveal how ecological knowledge is held in bodies, landscapes, and craft traditions. Her projects highlight the fragility of our sensory connection to place and the cultural legacies embedded in local environments.
Niamh Schmidtke works across sound, ceramics, writing, and installation to examine the politics of “being green,” interrogating the financial, colonial, and linguistic structures that shape environmental discourse. Their practice cultivates speculative conversations with the environment—listening to deep time, the sea, and mineral worlds—to critique greenwashing and explore intimacy as a decolonial method for imagining ecological futures.
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.
