Welcome to the Neighbourhood 2025
Throughout June, Askeaton

Welcome to the Neighbourhood situates Irish and international artists in the midst of Askeaton each summer, discovering new potentials for creative energy, the making of place and innovative ecological thinking. From our community hall to the River Deel, castle ruins, streets and surrounding countryside, Welcome To The Neighbourhood looks to the rich layers of Askeaton’s daily life as its inspiration, as a place of exchange and cultural knowledge. Artists Roderick Buchanan, Niamh Schmidtke and Stuart Whipps lived and worked here throughout June 2025. 

Niamh Schmidtke explores the political complications of ‘being green’, examining the relationship between listening and speaking, considering the kinds of environmental voices that time, nature and humans could have with one another. In Askeaton, Niamh constructed from timber, fabric and red oxide dye a moveable structure, a conscious reference to the toxic red deposits seen strewn over the landscape at Aughinish Alumina, Europe’s largest bauxite refinery close by. The structure appeared in medieval buildings such as the nave of the local Franciscan Friary and inside the belltower of the Knights Templar, where members of the Inbhar Glen Community Choir and local Askeaton community joined to sing a song dedicated to the future of the Shannon Estuary nearby. 

From Glasgow, Roderick Buchanan is an explorer of people, places, cultural identity, and forgotten histories. For decades, in exhibitions around the world, he has opened up new understandings of how the everyday and the political are entwined. In From B to A, from Bishopsbriggs to Askeaton, Buchanan abided to travel in a straight line from his house in Glasgow, across Scotland and Ireland, to Askeaton. Along the way, his movements took him to a variety of sites – places of contested history and strange memory – conjuring up an evocative representation of the past. Maps and documents, alongside video artworks made during the journey appeared inside special viewing devices in Askeaton Community Hall, and Roddie performed a reading recalling his family lineage from ancient times to now, all the time with affection and humour.

Stuart Whipps from Birmingham considers art as a way of learning from people and places, using curiosity to discover the world. Appearing in Moran’s hardware shop window throughout summer 2025, his video Askeaton Hands is a portrait of the local community made during his stay, and a representation of the hands that move, handle and shape the very existence of everyday life in Askeaton and its hinterland. Another series of images appeared in out-of-the-way places of the town, photographs taken throughout Europe during the artist travels that, by their placement, made surreal comparisons between the built environment of here and elsewhere, akin to a doppelganger effect.  

A wide-ranging programme of events accompany artists’ residencies each year, with a focus in 2025 on community activism, local future ecologies, and kinship with nature. Artist Deirdre O’Mahony began a new project exploring farming life and the volatile demands of the market, harvesting and food regulation by holding a public conversation with Askeaton farmer Nora Foley. Paul O’Keefe, with Transport Infrastructure Ireland and Archaeological Management Solutions, presented medieval artefacts found during road construction near Askeaton, while Séagh Mac Siúrdáin, an independent advisor on environmental campaigns along the west coast, spoke about the challenges and hopes for the polluted Deel River, and the unparallelled yet threatened beauty of the Shannon Estuary.