Future Artifacts presents the artistic research of five 2025 MA Candidates at the Burren College of Art. Bringing together painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and experimental material processes, our work is rooted in a refusal to lose the imagination battle with facism. In a time of genocide and ecocide, we draw upon history, myth, folklore, and alchemy in our attempts to metabolize collective grief and insist on speculative futures of survival and interdependence. 

Erlend Evensen is a Norwegian visual artist. Evensen holds a BFA from KABK (Royal Academy of Art, The Hague) and UMPRUM (Prague). He is currently finishing his MA in Studio Art at BCA (Burren College of Art, Ireland).

My art takes many forms; painting and ink drawing, stop motion animation, assemblage and spacial installations. I craft worlds in black and white freely lifting from Hermeticism, Symbolism, early experimental cinema and cartoons. Atmospheric worlds with majestic depth, echoing inner and outer realms, decorated in occult symbols. The strict use of only black and white is a graphic, philosophical limit which places the work on a threshold between the two epic forces and the strange third zebra-world they open up. In the dada tradition of using basic cheap material, by directly engaging with capitalism’s waste, rather than simply rejecting it, these perspectives open pathways for artistic and material transformation; an act of radical opposition through creative reconfiguration. I see the artist as a Magician, Alchemist and Witch working with physical material to metaphysical ends. The ever changing, fluid transience of matter animated by spirits. The octopus and its ink serve as key symbols in my work, embodying a dark, fluid intelligence and mystical complexity, echoing the symbol of the black sun. The godlike tentacular beast expelling a black fluid ink, first matter manifesting unconsciousness on white emptiness.

The creative process is constantly ongoing, fluidly exploring and reevaluating itself, the exhibited works of art are merely gems distilled from the work. The materials themselves and their use are challenging notions of value and valueless, wanted and unwanted. Growth and decay in constant stride.

As a mixed race person with Japanese with Irish heritage, the work I make is rooted in my family’s encounters with assimilation and the desire to experience ancestral belonging. My artistic inquiry explores the historic and sociological ghosts that haunt us; I seek to find meaning in the liminal spaces between cultural amnesia, grief, and resistance to the pervasive forces of capitalism and consumerism. Situating my work primarily in printmaking and sculptural practices, my artistic inquiry is engaged with using the inherent personality of paper to draw the viewer into intimate and inquisitive encounters with depictions of memory. My work for Future Artifacts is inspired by cenotaphs, shrines, and sacred wells. It is an attempt to memorialize places impacted and lost to war and displacement. Through blind embossed printmaking, I interconnect signifiers of Japanese American, Irish, and Palestinian sites shaped by violence and resistance. In doing so, I hope to invoke a tactile meditation on the varied yet synchronous ways in which communities navigate not only the tension between remembrance and disappearance, but the possibility of resilience in the face of seemingly insurmountable loss. 

I am an emerging artist and community organizer who I grew up on unceded Anishinaabe land, colonially known as Southeast Michigan. I earned my B.A. in Social Theory & Practice from the University of Michigan in 2017 and am an M.A. candidate in Art & Ecology at the Burren College of Art. My work has appeared in various community and public art projects in Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Los Angeles.

My artistic research is led by an instinctive interest in material; I am largely focused on working with weedy or abundant plants and waste stream objects. In doing so, I question how attending with care to overgrowing, undesirable, or polluting material might shape perceptions of home, place, and belonging. This practice is a way of responding to my own deep grief and overwhelm in the face of climate crisis and settler un-belonging. While collaborating with various media, I ground myself in textile handicraft traditions and the frameworks of care, maintenance, and repair that they exemplify. My work in Future Artifacts approaches wild pigments as teachers who have much to say about human impacts; colonial occupation, settlement, agricultural development, and more. Woven into patchy and ongoing maps of place and relationship, they are the navigational tools that I have assembled as I orient myself towards futures of mutual flourishing. 

I am an artist, educator, and writer originally from Abenaki territory, from that small stretch of loamy soil that we call Vermont. My work is shaped by this landscape and culture; I am deeply interested in rural communities, and in particular, how white settlers like myself understand their relationship to place under colonialism. I completed my B.A. in Sociology at Colorado College in 2020, focusing my degree on community-based research methods and food justice. During this time, I also studied printmaking and weaving and became a student docent at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. I worked for several years in garden education, community food access, and local agriculture in Maine, USA. In 2024, I completed a weaving concentration at the Penland School of Craft, and I am currently pursuing an M.A. in Art & Ecology at the Burren College of Art in Ireland.

Genevieve Moberly (b. 1998) is a painter whose practice explores speculative futures through the languages of myth, art history, science fiction, and animal mysticism. Holding a BFA from the Maine College of Art & Design (Portland, Maine, United States), she is currently pursuing an MA from the Burren College of Art (Co. Clare, Ireland). Moberly’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions, including at Nightshade Contemporary, WREN Gallery, and the ICA at MECAD. She works in oil, watercolor, and gouache and lends each medium to depicting densely botanical and reimagined landscapes. 

I am interested in the dynamics of interspecies relationships, symbiosis, biological mimicry, and the ways in which animal mysticism has manifested across global art histories and mythologies, particularly those found within depictions of utopian and Edenic landscapes. My current body of work hypothesizes an alternate, reparative reality in the face of increasing environmental disasters, political unrest, and total climate collapse via the deployment of fantastical scenes of interspecial resiliency. Through layered, immersive compositions I am telling a story of a world where existential desire is louder than catastrophe and where the speculative and the sacred are irrevocably enmeshed.

Melissa has spent years capturing still-images of people, and landscapes from around the world with a unique and distinctive style. She might be an introvert, but her camera has given her a voice and the courage to push herself outside of comfort and into new opportunities to include teaching photography in India for 5 months and now attending Burren College of Art. She also holds an MFA in Photography and Sculpture from University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Melissa draws much of her inspiration from cinematography and mythology to create art that draws the viewer into dialogue with natural cycles.

At Burren College of Art, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with the terrain around me in the Burren and bring my artistic vision to stage the connection all humans have with the wildness around them. My intent has been to pay respect to the passing of time and bring to light the impression that nature makes on me as well as the impact I make on it. My images use dramatic skies, dark textural tones, motion and transformation to communicate mystery and impermanence.