Rob and Matt Vale — Lough Lannagh Ripples
A choreographed light and sound performance on the new bridge, made with local students and musicians, in which dozens of small, repeated gestures combined to create a single, large-scale visual ripple across the water.

Ian Wilson — Still Life in Green and Red
A seven-movement composition for string quartet, built from interviews recorded across Mayo on the theme of optimism during the economic downturn — weaving local voices into a wider musical meditation on resilience.

Elaine Griffin — Landmarks
A trail of small-scale bronze sculptures — including a replica of General Humbert's 1798 hat and objects referencing the area's Bronze Age and medieval past — sited to draw attention to specific, often hidden histories of the lake and its surrounds.

Texts, interviews, and editing by Sarah Searson. Link Here

Landmark was a multi-dimensional public art project sited at Lough Lannagh, Castlebar, curated by Mayo County Council's Public Art Coordinator, Gaynor Seville. Planned in anticipation of the park's redevelopment, the programme brought together seven commissions over two years — two permanent works, two commissions aimed at younger artists, a year-long composer's residency, and two temporary or performance-based pieces alongside a professional development strand, Connect, developed with artist Aideen Barry.

Sarah Searson was commissioned to write and edit the accompanying booklet in full: a prologue essay setting the project in its historical and cultural context, together with in-depth interviews with each of the seven commissioned artists.

Her prologue essay, A Working Arm; The Stuff of Legends, ranges across the history of Lough Lannagh and Castlebar from Michael Davitt's Mayo origins to the discovery of the Céide Fields  to think through questions of land, ownership, and public space that Landmark's commissions were also grappling with. The interviews that follow draw out each artist's process and thinking in detail.

Jennifer Brady — The Known World
A year in the making, this experimental nature documentary used the mute swans of Lough Lannagh as a symbol of uncertainty, borrowing and subverting the tone of wildlife television to explore the blurred line between fact and staged "reality."

Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly — On Sight
Four permanent sculptural viewing posts exploring binocular vision, each showing the lake through subtly mismatched left- and right-eye video, producing a haunting, perceptually destabilising image of a familiar place.

Fionnuala Hanahoe — Bridging Sounds
Turned the new pedestrian bridge into a playable instrument, fitting it with megaphone-like sound modules that emitted synthesized tones when activated by passers-by, inviting walkers to make their own fleeting, musical "mark" on the landscape.

Tom Swift / The Performance Corporation — Across the Lough
An intimate theatrical performance for an audience of three, rowed across the lake by a boatman whose monologue wove together myth (the Children of Lir, Charon), migration, and mortality.