Artists in Residence 2025/2026
Photo by Malcolm McGettigan
Louise Beer
UCD College of Science in partnership with Mayo Dark Sky Park & National Parks and Wildlife Services
I am an artist and curator, from Aotearoa New Zealand. I use installation, moving image, photography, writing, participatory elements and sound to explore humanity's evolving understanding of Earth’s environments and the cosmos. Having lived under both low-level light-polluted skies in Aotearoa and high-level light-polluted skies in cities in England, I investigate how these contrasting experiences can shape our perception of grief, the climate crisis, and Earth’s deep time past and future.
My process
I absorb myself into a landscape during the daylight and nighttime hours, and watch and listen to the flora and fauna present. I engage in my practice of Celestial Immersion which involves spending time under the stars, listening to the soundscape and feeling the atmosphere move around me. This practice helps me learn about a landscape from a cosmic perspective, using my scientific knowledge to understand our place within the universe.
Using photography and audio field recording, I gather material that forms the basis of immersive installations and reflective works, created later. I use digital cameras and hydrophones, contact mics and binaural mic sound recorders. My photographic images are digitally manipulated and layered, combining three temporalities - the astronomic, the geologic and the biological.
I collaborate with scientists through conversation and writing - which has shaped my practice for over 12 years. Working with local communities deepens my understanding of place and helps me to create work that bridges lived experience with research. I design workshops to offer space for reflection on our personal and collective relationship with the cosmos and the changing climate.
These engagements are woven through the final works. Dissemination takes multiple forms: galleryexhibitions, conferences, site-specific installations, publications, and community events.
Plans for the Mayo Dark Sky Park Residency
I will immerse myself in the cosmos while engaging with some of Earth’s most ancient terrestrial ecosystems. The bogs offer a window through time to the individual trees and plants that lived thousands of years ago. I will research the geological and biological histories of the NP, weaving the stories through my art work.
Wild Nephin National Park offers a uniquely dark, minimally light-polluted environment where we can still see Earth as a planetary landscape - without the common traces of modern humanity. Its geology, flora, fauna and expansive night sky provide an exceptional setting to study long-term geological, ecological and astronomical processes. The residency will allow me to connect with local flora, fauna, geology, and the night sky through walking, celestial observation, photography, and sound.
Earth, a Cosmic Spectacle situates the climate crisis within a deep-time framework, examining the improbable sequence of astronomical, geological, and biochemical events that made Earth habitable, and how current environmental pressures threaten these systems.
During the residency, I will develop a new body of photographic and sound work. The images will combine terrestrial features with the astronomical, while soundscapes will capture native fauna and environmental processes, reflecting ecological dynamics over deep time.A participatory letter-writing component will connect scientists, local communities, and the public, nurturing dialogue between empirical knowledge, artistic practice, and personal reflection.
I will walk with members of the Centre for Space Research and Earth Institute, guides and rangers on site, reflecting on the 13.8-billion-year history that led to our environment and discussing local and broader climate impacts, and ask them to write an anonymous letter whilst looking into the dark skies of Mayo.
The residency will intertwine scientific understanding, sensory experience, and participatory practice.
The work aims to cultivate a ‘care connection’ with the environment, translating complex ecological and astronomical knowledge into experiential understanding of our place in deep time and inspiring ethical engagement with the climate crisis.
Previous Works
Earth, a Cosmic Spectacle
Tūhura Otago Museum
This body of work contains 13 large scale photographic images, a soundscape, a collection of letters from scientists and from high school students.
The intention behind the works is to bring together different temporalities. The first being the long and slow development of Earth as a planet, and consequently life on Earth, alongside the brief moment of an existence and the quickening effects of the climate crisis. Trees, with lifespans sometimes longer than our own, seem to metaphorically bridge the momentary nature of a life and the time beyond the bounds of our lifetimes.
The soundscape was recorded on frosty mornings in the garden of the home I am staying in Purakaunui. Listening through headphones and through microphones gives me the feeling of being witness to a secret world of animals to which I am not usually privy. Whilst looking out at the harbour as the sun rose above the landscape, I was reminded of how many millions of years the sun has lit up these hills and woken the birds from their slumber.
Thomas Halliday wrote in Otherlands, “The aggregations of species that produce a feeling of place also provide a sense of time”. (Halliday, 2022) Not only is it a challenge to think of how unique life on Earth is in all of the endless universe, but that our experience of it and what feels familiar is connected to this moment of Earth’s inconceivably long history, and future.
The work has been displayed at Tūhura Otago Museum, Aotearoa New Zealand, Bright Island Studio, Margate and the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. Funded by a British Council Connections through Culture Grant. It was completed in October 2024 in collaboration with astronomer Dr Ian Griffin and Tūhura Otago Museum, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Title Earth, a Cosmic Spectacle II
Dimensions 1000 × 760mm
Materials Digitally layered photography
Gallery/site of installation
Beautiful Science Gallery, Tūhura Otago Museum, Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand
Date
2024
Thinking through the Night
This piece was developed for my solo exhibition Dark Reflections in the North York Moors in 2022.
I had a pile of self addressed and stamped envelopes with instructions and a postcard inside. The audience was invited to take one, after visiting my piece Ascending.
The instructions stated:
On a clear night gaze up into the stars and planets and think about our place within the solar system. Think about the vast distances between the planets in our solar system and the immense periods of time that they have orbited our star. Think about the rotation of Earth and the age of the ground beneath you and how its elements were formed.
Think about the geologic time periods it has taken to create the oceans, mountains and forests across our planet and those life forms that we share these spaces with. Look into our galaxy and beyond.
What do you think about when you look into the night sky? Write down your feelings on the postcard.
Title Thinking through the Night
Dimensions Variable
Materials Postcards
Gallery/site of installation Inspired by… Gallery, North York Moors Dark Sky Park, England
Date 2021
See also
