Niamh Butler

Niamh Butler (b. 1988, Ballinasloe, Ireland) is an Irish multidisciplinary designer & artist based in Athlone. After graduating from the University of Plymouth with a Masters in Architecture she designed beautiful award-winning family homes with Brennan Furlong Architects in Dublin.

A strong calling to both implement solutions to the housing crisis at a grassroots level and with a curiosity to more fully understand our societies legal relationships to land led to a collaboration with Open Systems Lab, a London based remote R&D lab. She led the research of new and ancient models of land ownership ad co-created the Atlas of Ownership: an open digital library and tool to map any type of human societies legal relationships to the earth, around the world and throughout history.

After living abroad for 2 years in Portugal and a winter in Australia surfing she is back in her native roots of Athlone developing a more hands-on tangible creative practice to find balance after 3 years of academic research holistically in an authentic way, working with natural dyeing and textiles.

Artist Statement

Niamh has worked on the tangible alongside the intangible: clothes, rugs, interior spaces, buildings, homes, edible gardens, social constructs such as land ownership and planning laws. Her goal is always to bring more beauty, order and harmony into the world through the design and making of clothes, textiles, homes and habitats.

She is currently naturally dyeing onto reclaimed and locally abundant cotton, linen and wool with slow processes that are nurturing to people and our water ecology.

This artistic practice is influenced by a holistic design approach, that recognizes that we are all part of a greater whole, and each decision affects the wider ecosystem. Themes of wellbeing, earth stewardship and practical decolonization are integral to her work.

Many industrial processes of our textiles have created imbalances in community e.g. women gathering together to share skills and create textiles, and to our ecology – e.g. over-production and toxic materials used in production are harmful to ecological wellbeing.

Niamh is currently offering local workshops in dyeing, sewing clothing garments from reclaimed materials and felting raw sheep’s wool.

Dates of Residency in Abbey: October 2024 – May 2025