Inhale Exhale – Ecologies That Refuse to Behave unfolds as a constellation of works where peatlands, sensors, and slow code converge in quiet insurgency. Across these works, Mc Donald hijacks the tools of climate science—flux towers, CO₂ sensors, automated chambers and redirects them toward ecological intimacy. Developed through years of durational embodied research with Ireland’s National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), these technologies become collaborators shaped through shared data practices, mutual trust, and sustained field attention.
The work draws on real-time CO₂ measurements from on-site and distant sensors including eddy covariance flux towers, instruments that monitor peatlands by recording the ecosystem’s “breathing” and tracing annual carbon cycles. Algorithmic works retrieve aggregated CO₂ flux data at 30-minute intervals and translate this atmospheric exchange into the rhythm of human breath, aligning atmospheric processes with embodied time. Over four years of attending to these daily fluctuations, Mc Donald has observed the data gradually settling within the rewetted cutaway bog at All Saints, County Offaly. This subtle calming mirrors the landscape itself, where earthen bunds divide the peatland into shallow cells that slowly refill with rainwater.
Low-power algorithmic drawings, data-driven sculpture, custom greenhouse gas chambers, giclée prints, wearable CO₂ receivers, and sensor-based performances assemble into a techno-ecology that resists optimization. The works attend to quieter rhythms of ecological change—embracing drift, fluctuation, and the slow recalibration of living ground. 
Mc Donald’s small file methodology privileges ecological time, subtle perception, and minimal energy use. Her coded line drawings, developed using low-resolution datasets, position “small-footprint” media as both aesthetic strategy and ecological ethic. 

Artworks and film by Fiona McDonald
Technical support: Dr Gerard Boland, Dr Nicholas Ward, Marks Jaliseve. 
Commissioned spatial sound: Jürgen Simpson 
Project manager, graphic design: Sarah Mc Fadden

Film: 
Director producer, co-script: Fiona McDonald 
Cinematography & editor: Lynda Devenney 
Commissioned poems & co-script: Jessica Foley 
Sound design: Abby Nagle Garne & Karima Dillon El-Toukhy 
Performance: Stefan Hanly, Luke Casserly, Bryony Archer, Helen Flannagan, Fiona Crawley, Iseult Aiken

With support from: The Arts Council of Ireland, Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts RHA Dublin, National Parks and Wildlife Services NPWS Ireland, Parity Studios University College Dublin and SEED project Dublin City University, Rosemount Research Station UCD, School of Civil Engineering UCD 

Fiona McDonald (IE) is a media artist working at the intersection of art, ecology, and technology. She holds a BSc in Biological Chemistry from the University of Ulster, a BA and an MA in Fine Art from National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and an MSc in Multimedia Systems from Trinity College Dublin. Her current research explores carbon cycles and more-than-human temporalities through Ireland’s restored peatlands recovering from years of peat extraction. Working across sculpture, installation, print, hardware, and code, her small-file methodology resists speed and scale, attuning instead to ecological time: slowness as resistance and care.

This work was selected for its well-researched exploration of the relationship between ecological restoration and technological systems. Peatlands have become central to conversations around climate action, carbon capture, and the expanding infrastructures of the digital economy, and this work offers a timely reflection on the entanglement of these environmental and technological futures. Through years of sustained collaboration with scientists and ecologists, Fiona McDonald transforms scientific instruments and environmental data into living, perceptual experiences. The jury was particularly drawn to the project's commitment to slowness. By translating the “breathing” of peatlands into visual, sonic and kinetic forms, the work reveals technology as a means of fostering ecological understanding and coexistence.