yield / bloom is a multi-format multimedia installation, comprising installation, paintings and film as part of a work of social practice that interrogates the ongoing ecocide at Lough Neagh. yield / bloom is physically and conceptually divided into two halves: yield frames the disaster through the satirical lens of the corporate financial year. “Q1: Projection" is an installation that builds on work I started in previous semesters of corporate advertising unsafe water as a product. “Q2: Asset Growth” is an oil painting painted on the literal Stormont policy “Going for Growth” policy documents that incentivised profit over planet, showing an otter killed by the toxic algae. “Q3: Acceptable Losses” is an oil painting on headlines I’ve collected since the start of my course, with a factory farm, the result of the previous policy, killing eels in the water. “Q4: The Audit” is an oil painting of extractive sand dredging of Lough Neagh, carved in between newspapers of property headlines, showing the ultimate damage to habitats.

Finally, on an adjacent wall, bloom is a 9 minute short film titled “Unyielding”, directed by myself, showing when the communities of Lough Neagh defeated BP’s attempt at extraction in 1986. Crucially, the work is exhibited directly within the “Save Lough Neagh Film Festival” I am organising for the "Save Lough Neagh" campaign at Lough Neagh Discovery Centre, Co.Armagh, dissolving the boundary between gallery exhibition and active community organising with art. My project seeks to ask, can contemporary art and archival media transcend to function as an active mobilising tool for grassroots environmental campaigns and change? Can documenting historical victories within a contemporary art context serve as an antidote to modern environmental fatalism?