The Drummin Bog Project committee is delighted to announce that two proposals for the Drummin Bog Project are to be supported by Creative Ireland Carlow:
The Bog Rosemary and Fraughan Projects, listed below, build on the initiative of the Drummin Bog Project that created a successful community Hidden | Reveal art event at Visual Carlow, December 2017.
Drummin Bog is Carlow’s only raised bog. The Drummin Bog Project was formed in 2015 to conserve, restore and promote this special place. It is sited in a wider national context; as a member of the Community Wetlands Forum and as part of the overall growing environmental awareness of the importance of raised bogs, in their significance to lowering carbon emissions and as sensitive and important flora and fauna habitats.
The Drummin Bog project aims to engage the local community to the importance of this threatened environmental legacy, through interactive and trans-disciplinary possibilities within art, education, ecology and conservation.
1.
The Bog Rosemary Project is a creative concept to develop a collaborative eco-social art project within and around Drummin Bog, Co. Carlow’s only raised bog.
Rosemary is the plant symbolic of memory so the community, especially the older people with a specific cultural history of Drummin Bog, will be invited to work together with artists from south Carlow to produce oral histories, visual documentation of place, people, artefacts and personal mementoes, culminating in a video, book and online publication outcomes.
The Bog Rosemary Project will be undertaken in July to December 2018, and responds to one of the core objectives of the Drummin Bog Project to:
collect the oral history and develop the all cultural aspects of the bog with the local community and local schools.
A public art event to gather the community and to present the material created will be staged at the end of the project.
The motif for this project, that connects valued local, older resident’s memories with a desire to improve community awareness for a unique and important ecological habitat in South County Carlow, is Bog Rosemary. Bog Rosemary is unique to raised bogs and was noted on Drummin Bog by Robert Lloyd Praeger in his botanical survey of Ireland, later published as his book The Way That I Went in 1935. This fragile plant is still seen on Drummin Bog today and it is an indication that the habitat is not completely degraded as was initially thought. While not related botanically to the domestic herb Rosemary, the leaf habit is similar.
The Drummin Bog Rosemary collaborators for this project are:
Artists: (Jules Michael, Mairead Holohan, Cathy Fitzgerald & Annabel Konig).
Local Facilitators: Bridie Lawlor (SMART), Alexis Bernstorff
2.
“The Fraughan Project” is an extension of “The Bog Rosemary Project” . It is a concept to extend an eco-social art project within and around Drummin Bog, St Mullins, with the younger generation of the area during 2019.
A collaboration will take place between pupils of the three primary schools in the area (Glynn N. S., St. Brendan’s N.S. and St. Michael’s N.S.), artists Mairead Holohan and Jules Michael, Lorcan Scott (District Conservation Officer, National Parks and Wildlife Service), and members of the Drummin Bog Project, St. Mullins.
“The Fraughan Project” aims through creative practices to celebrate and value for younger generations a unique Carlow habitat of national ecological significance. It will foster valuable ideas about the future of Carlow County’s only raised bog and its care, while creating sustaining and engaging artworks within the primary school environment. Drummin Bog becomes the conduit, or common ground, to link art-making, younger people, artists and scientists with ideas of ecology, conservation, knowledge of the natural world and the cultural history specific to Drummin Bog.
A public art event will be staged at the end of the project. This will gather the surrounding community, the three national schools, their pupils and the project participants together to present the material created, celebrating the art-making, the participants and Drummin Bog itself. Online publicity through its own website and links from this to other bog conservation projects in the country will also raise its profile nationally.
The Drummin Bog Committee wish to thank Creative Ireland Carlow and Carlow County Council for their generous support.
The Drummin Bog committee also wishes to acknowledge Martin Lyttle, Jules Michael and Cathy Fitzgerald in the development of the successful proposals.
drumminbog.com 
Reblogged this on The Hollywood Forest Story : An Eco-Social Art Practice | Co. Carlow Ireland and commented:
I’m delighted to share that the Drummin Bog Project for Carlow’s only raised bog, has received support from Creative Ireland Carlow for two eco-social art projects.
I was particularly happy to find my doctoral research for developing an eco-social art practice theory and methodology framework, can be used not just for forests but bogs too!
The artistic team working for the Drummin Bog project includes fellow Nine Stone Artists: Jules Michael (lead artist for the projects), Martin Lyttle, Annabel Konig and other local artist-educator and art facilitator Mairead Holahan and Alexis Bernstorff.
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