On the balcony of Project Arts Centre, in Temple Bar in Dublin, something is growing. It’s not just the planters on castors but a research group led by Louis Haugh. The artist, who grew up in Blanchardstown, in the north of the city, is presiding over an evolving project that incorporates plants, fermentation practices and a small, queer community of growers and skill sharers.
Haugh graduated from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology in 2011; he studied photography. “Back then I was really motivated by what’s called historical processes, or 19th-century printing processes,” he says, “creating your own light-sensitive papers, light-sensitive emulsions on different surfaces. I was printing on to glass, paper, fabric, using these emulsions that I had made myself. The most common or recognisable of those is maybe cyanotype, that classic blue-and-white image. Or something that was really popular a few years ago was wet-plate collodion – you know those ethereal portraits on glass? I was really captivated by that kind of photography.”
A decade later he took a master’s in fine art at the National College of Art and Design. But he also has a relationship with food that gradually found its way into his practice. “My whole family were raised vegetarian,” he says. “We were always closely tied to preparing food and making food as kids. Growing up in the 1990s, you couldn’t just go out and get a spicy beanburger anywhere. So from a young age I was always soaking the lentils, doing the rice ... It’s only more recently that relationship with food has become a professional interest.”
Like so many people, he began making sourdough bread during the pandemic lockdowns, and “really liked the fermentation side of that, and how the fermentation of grain is, in a way, a metaphor for time”.
In 2023 he began working with Recovery through Art, Drama & Education, a Dublin-based organisation that helps drug users. He built a community garden in an underused concrete lot with a group, “looking at sustainable agricultural processes, things that could be grown and eaten; lots of different types of beans, tomato plants, courgettes.”
Haugh began examining critical views on ecology. He says there are lots of ways to explain and approach queer ecology. For him it’s looking at “plants, people and community and questioning the systems in place to define or regulate them, and it’s unpicking that system in a way that allows for other interpretations of the relationship of plants to exist, or the relationship between plants and people to exist.
“The most black-and-white way that I can describe it is that there was a Swedish botanist called Carl Linnaeus, who invented the Linnaean system for categorising plants into male and female. For sure it works for some plants, but the assumption it works for all plants is basically the flaw of that system; assuming all plants reproduce in a male-female binary, or assuming that all plants need another partner to reproduce.
“The other thing is assuming the exception is a rarity, and realising that actually the exception is really quite common. What we’re starting to see now – and I know less about animals than I do about plants – but say, for example, homosexual behaviour in animals, for decades it’s been, ‘oh, it’s a once-off’, but those exceptions were never really recorded with any scientific merit until recently. Now, the more we pay attention, record, observe, we realise it’s a staggering quantity and percentage. So it’s undoing our learned or taught assumptions around ecology.”
This brings us upstairs at the arts centre, to the Balcony Project. About half a dozen planters now live on the balcony, where Haugh leads the queer ecology group, as well as workshops. The group, who began meeting last May, built the planters on wheels; the first stage of the project was teaching people how to use tools properly. “It’s quite an emotional thing to see, a group of queer people come together with timber and using saws, and things that maybe some people would have shied away from in the past, or wouldn’t have had someone to show them how to do it without making fun of them.”
Then they began planting trees donated by the charity Easy Treesie. “We were originally looking at plants that maybe didn’t fit that male-female reproductive binary.” Haugh goes from planter to planter to explain. “The most common or prolific plant is the fern – it reproduces in a completely distinct way from how we maybe understand other plants reproduce. The cycle of it producing spores is not like other plants that produce pollen and eggs. Then we’re looking at plants who produce asexually – so we’ve got an unimpressive version of an iris here. An iris is a tuber, just like ginger or potatoes are tubers, distinct from a root vegetable or root crop, but similar in many ways. It can reproduce without another partner; it can just divide itself the way the blackberry can.”
He walks over to a ginkgo tree. “It’s known as the city planner’s worst nightmare, because they produce a really stinky, sticky fruit that comes at the end of summer and falls on to the street. It’s kind of like black tar that sticks to the street and is really hard to get rid of. It smells like hot trash – that’s what they say. In the United States in the 1990s, they started planting only male ginkgo trees in the city, so they wouldn’t fruit. That’s when they observed the male trees spontaneously growing female limbs.”
Next week the group will learn how to make a ginger bug, a wild-fermented starter culture that they can then use to make ginger beer and other drinks; they’ll be making the bug from scratch, at a fermentation workshop on the balcony. “Fermentation for me is just an extension of queer ecologies. There’s a really lovely historic significance in fermented practice and queer communities ... It’s a really lovely metaphor for queer community, this kind of microscopic community of fungi and bacteria and different lactic acids coming together to create something really diverse and beautiful.”
As for how Haugh’s practice itself has grown, he says: “On paper it’s a little surprising, in that I studied photography – you make pictures, have exhibitions – and now I’m up here making ginger bug. But I think when you connect all the pieces and look at my upbringing, background, interest in food – I worked in a ton of cafes – it kind of makes sense.”
