We are pleased to announce Laura Ní Fhlaibhín as the recipient of the Soil Project residency for 2025.

Laura's work will centre around the role of mycelium networks and fungi as essential components to soil health and vitality. Laura will spend the residency engaged in fungi research. The public will have the opportunity to participate in a public talk on fungi, a fungi walk and drawing workshops. The project will culminate in the creation and printing of a pamphlet featuring Laura’s research, poetic responses, and visual work, which will be shared with the public toward the end of the residency.

The project will increase public awareness and appreciation of the world of fungi, an often overlooked contributor to the health of our ecosystems.

Public Event details to be announced soon

About the Artist

Laura Ní Fhlaibhín is an artist from Wexford and completed her MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019 with Distinction and her BA at NCAD Dublin in 2013. She is the recipient of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin Staff Prize Bursary, the Goldsmiths Graduate Almacantar Bursary 2019, Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award 2020, Arts Council England Developing Creative Practice Award 2021 and Arts Council of Ireland Bursaries. Laura was a studio participant at Conditions Programme London and at Firestation, Dublin.She is a Gilbert Bayes Royal Sculpture Society Awardee 2024 and was twice shortlisted for the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award U.K, 2023 and 2024. Laura’s work features in the Arts Council of Ireland collection and private collections. Laura undertook a research residency at The Henry Moore Research Institute Leeds in 2024 and is the Derek Hill Scholarship Residency recipient at The British School of Rome, 2025.
Solo and two-person exhibitions include Britta Rettberg Gallery, Munich (2024), The Complex Dublin (2024), Commonage, London (2024), Belmacz London (2023) Palfrey London (2020). Recent group exhibitions include Hollybush Gardens London (2025) and ‘Footfalls’, curated by Yara Sonseca, Britta Rettberg Gallery, Munich (2024). Later this year Laura will exhibit at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and at Ormston House/EVA international.

Statement

Laura Ní Fhlaibhín works with materials related to healing and nourishment, both ecological and autobiographical. Sifting stories, materials and traces associated with site, memory, narratives of care and the casting of spells, she creates complex but pithy material scenarios. Her practice makes space for the more than human within the art-institution setting, white cube spaces becoming incubators for living beings such as earthworms, leopard slugs and willow trees. Working across sculpture, installation, writing and drawing, embodied care is both represented and inscribed in the material and narrative improvisations that are interwoven in her sculptural assemblages. She builds installations that operate as symbiotic ecosystems; sculptural assemblages giving structural and biological support, such as a network of soil pipes filled with worm bedding materials or a medicinal, and warming alcoholic tincture offered to gallery visitors over the course of an exhibition. Her assemblages function as nourishing hosts for growth and invite guardianship from the art-institution hosts. The looming threats of the environmental crisis and biodiversity loss echo through the work, and in her attention towards the material entanglements of our worlds, across species and things, she points to vibrant and nourishing kinships that can emerge from such alliances. The political charge and potential of art making to co-exist as an ecological type of caregiving is a constant motivation.