Peatlands That Breathe: Fiona McDonald’s Inhale Exhale Explores Climate Data Through Slow Media and Restoration

Inhale Exhale – Ecologies That Refuse to Behave is an ambitious solo exhibition by artist Fiona McDonald, unfolding as a quiet insurgency staged through peatlands, sensors, and slow code. Across the project, McDonald hijacks the tools of climate science – flux towers, CO₂ sensors, automated chambers – and reroutes them into something they were never designed for: ecological intimacy. Developed through years embedded with the National Parks and Wildlife Service NPWS, these instruments are treated not as neutral data-harvesting devices but as collaborators, shaped by shared data, trust, and sustained attention.

The exhibition draws on real-time CO₂ data gathered from Eddy Covariance flux towers that monitor peatlands by measuring the ecosystems’ “breathing.” While attending to daily CO₂ cycles over four years, McDonald observes the data gradually settling within the rewetted cutaway bog at All Saints Co. Offally, echoing the landscape itself as peat cells slowly refill with rainwater. Rather than striving for predictive certainty, the works listen to quieter rhythms – embracing drift, fluctuation, and the slow recalibration of restored land.

Formed through restored bogs, shared data, and slow walking with scientists and NPWS contractors, the works emerge from peatlands that store carbon, memory, and breath – living archives whose capacity to store carbon, regulate water, and sustain life is inseparable from practices of care and restoration.

Low-power animations, custom-designed handmade greenhouse gas chambers, data-driven giclée prints, wearable CO₂ receivers, and sensor-driven performances converge into a techno-ecology that resists optimisation. McDonald’s slow-media, small-file methodology privileges ecological time, subtle perception, and minimal energy use. Her data-driven, coded line drawings, developed in JavaScript using low-resolution datasets, position “small footprint” media as a mode of resistance and intimacy

By visualising CO₂ flux at the rhythm of human breath, McDonald aligns atmospheric processes with embodied human time. Other works trace a lineage to early eighteenth-century glass-chamber experiments that first revealed how plants regenerate air. In We Share the Same Air and a new series of floating chambers developed for a filmed performance at All Saints Bog, the chamber is reimagined not as a sealed container but as a porous, light-permeable ecosystem. Echoing the Wardian case – once an instrument of colonial plant transfer – these works redirect enclosure toward reciprocity and care.

The film Bund Walkers / Cloud Chambers, situated in the rewetted bog of All Saints, Co. Offaly, grounds the exhibition in the living landscape that shaped it.

#InhaleExhale • fionamcdonald.digital