Inside Mayo Atlas, the Research Project Exploring the Landscapes of County Mayo

Feature image: Architecture at the Edge, by Take a Siesta

One of these exhibitions belongs to Castlebar native Aidan Conway, founder of architectural company MarMar and the brain behind Mayo Atlas; a striking research project exploring the built environment and landscapes of County Mayo.

We caught up with Aidan to discuss MarMar, Mayo Atlas and the way he’s exploring abstract ideas about context, structure and space through his technical craft.

“I studied abroad in Scotland for my Bachelors, and went on to do my Masters in Holland. When I first came out of college, there was no hope of getting a job here at all. The idea of having your own practice was mad. The fact that this all worked out, it’s brilliant.”

Aidan set up his architecture business MarMar in 2021, and has been working on a variety of projects since, some commercial, some domestic, some public. But Mayo Atlas is entirely different, not just because it’s a deviation from standard architectural offerings; it’s much more personal, verging on the philosophical.

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“I got a bursary from the Arts Council – an amazing thing, to be afforded the room to work on something you’re passionate about. It allowed me to learn how to use photogrammetry, a surveying technique where you take lots of photographs and feed them into a program, and that program finds common points in the images and constructs a 3d model from that. So you have this really intricate scan of a site, and this rich base of information. I carried that process through to this study.”

Aidan identified sites in Mayo that were of interest to him to scan – 11 in total for this particular exhibit – all varying in scale and style, from a piece of furniture to a room to a sandstone quarry.

The rare native oak woodland Aillebaun features, with a close look at its natural composition. Alongside Aidan’s scans following the changing scale of oak from sapling to tree, a rug tufted by London based artist Lottie Mac expresses the canopy, and photos by Aisling McCoy capture the wet, dark green of the forest’s foliage.

“Some of the sites caught my attention because of local history, others I was more focussed on a specific detail; the material, the environment. It’s been a way of embedding myself in a specific context by learning as much as possible about disparate things. Studying specific moments that, at times, may offer universal insights. The beginning point of each site is my curiosity in them, but then they all go off in different directions and tell their own story. It’s like each scan reveals a thread, and then you pull, and you follow it.”

It’s a body of work that’s “hard to pin down,” admits Aidan, though this didn’t stop him from finding collaborators who understood the essence of the work and how to realise it – even if they may have started with more questions than answers.

“Each scan reveals a thread, and then you pull, and you follow it.”

“I think they were all like, ‘What do you want me to do?’ and I was like, ‘I don't really know! I'm just going to bring you here and we’ll see what happens,’ and then it would come together in the space. It was very organic.” 

It’s this undefinable quality that makes Mayo Atlas all the more intriguing – and all the more worth experiencing in person. At the Festival Printworks Gallery, Mayo Atlas manifests in a sprawl of drawings, scans and models, plus a film showing cellist Claire Kinsella (of Lemoncello) playing in the historic open-air Achill Amphitheatre; a fitting contribution for this profound and immersive exhibition.

Mayo Atlas is running at the Festival Printworks Gallery on Market Street until Sunday 27th September. Admission is free and no booking is required. Find out more here.