My current work considers how the liminal landscapes, of boglands, neither land nor water, might be a site of queer ecological and queer history thinking. Full of folklore, bogs are home to otherly beings like Boggarts and Will o’ the Wisps. Found at the periphery they are marginal. They defy binaries. Fluid. They subvert dominant ideologies that have devalued them and exhort action.

Revering these landscapes, our ancestors observed the bog for its magical power to preserve. Precious offerings were given up to a kind of organic time capsule, communicating with us through deep time. There are many artefacts that reflect the in-between spaces of bogs, among them the Gundestrup Cauldron, which is decorated with Celtic motifs of beyond-the-binary depictions of seahorses, animal hybrids and people riding on dolphins.

Queer plants are plants which are hermaphroditic, bisexual, asexual, undergo sex changes, or which generally do not comply with binaries of gender.. like separate gender parts. Among these plants a number of them grow in wetlands; Liverworts, lilies, and bog beans, Gunnera to name a few.

For years bogs have been extracted for peat, burned, drained, built on and farmed on industrial scale. The idea that land is valuable only if it is productive or profitable is part of a capitalist ideology that neglects the vital role that bogs play environmentally. Dougal’s artworks and writings celebrate these marginalised in-between spaces for their diversity and quiet natural abundance.