Luke Casserly collaborated with renowned perfumer Joan Woods to create a unique essence of the Midlands bog – the place where he grew up – as the starting point for an olfactory encounter exploring our relationship to place.
Created in direct response to the closure of Ireland’s peat harvesting industry, Distillation is dedicated to the future of our broken landscapes – in the hope that by listening to them, we might be able to better understand them.
The production premiered as part of Dublin Theatre Festival in 2023, and has since toured extensively across Ireland, the USA, and Canada, earning widespread critical acclaim.
About
Luke Casserly is a multidisciplinary performance maker from Longford, Ireland, whose work weaves together ecological research, autobiography, sound art, and site as a way of carving out space for new possibilities to emerge between live performance and physical landscape. His projects have brought audiences through city streets, back gardens, train stations, beaches, and a bog in the Irish Midlands which have led to the creation of a network of wildflower meadows across Ireland (1000 Miniature Meadows, 2020-23), the planting of 1000 indigenous trees (Root, 2021), and the development of an organic perfume made using botanicals from the Irish bog (Distillation, 2023).
Often using autobiography as a starting point, Casserly’s work attempts to stretch out new conversations around our human impact on the environment. Interested in making work which has a positive environmental legacy beyond the moment of live encounter with an audience, Casserly is driven to create gentle, subversive interventions in response to the climate crisis – and avoid leaning into the anxiety, greenwashing, and didacticism that often revolves around this topic in contemporary society.
