In May 2025 Melissa O’Brien, along with Karen Browett, were as graduates, invited to represent the Professional Diploma in Art and Ecology NCAD as National Biodiversity Week artists in residence at Glenveagh National Park, Donegal with National Parks and Wildlife.
They spent two weeks living and working onsite in the National Park making plant based photographic works.
The first part of the works made by Melissa were long exposure digital pinhole photographs. She installed pinhole cameras made from recycled drinks cans, which were collected on site, in various locations throughout the National Park. The photographs they produced captured the slow, deliberate unfolding of time in Glenveagh National Park at the specific chosen locations over an 8 day period.
The pinhole camera works by light entering a tiny pinhole in the side of a drinks can where it imprints an image on the light-sensitive photographic paper inside. As the pinhole was left open for eight days it was a very long exposure and each image shows the passage of the sun through the sky each day. Each bright line is the trail of the sun over a full day.
During the two week residency Melissa made a variety of test anthotypes using emulsions from plant material, with permission from the National Parks and Wildlife Team at Glenveagh.
The images used for the final anthotypes were slices or cross sections of a variety of habitats in the parks, from old forest to castle gardens reflecting the species that combine to make up these current existing ecologies.
Both of these anthotypes were made and exposed on site using plant material specific to the site, which permission from the National Park. As anthotypes in general can take various amounts of time to expose depending on the level of pigments in the plants themselves, the amount of sunlight available and the combination of mixtures of plants, these were brought back to Dublin at the end of the residency to expose for a further 2 months.
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