Regenerative Art & Design
Practices for Shared Ecologies

Since 2022, he has worked in partnership with Project Arts Centre to design and deliver community initiatives centred on ecological concerns and the climate emergency. His practice is collaborative and socially engaged, working with working class, minority and LGBT+ communities through residencies, workshops, educational outreach and long-term school partnerships.

His research focuses on ecology, environment and collective responsibility toward the climate emergency, creating space for communities to engage with these challenges directly. Louis also coordinates Lens Cultures at NCAD as part of the Media BA programme, and works independently as a Museum Photographer for a range of national institutions.

Community Gardens, Food Sovereignty & Social Action: A model for a decentralised all-island seed-saving network

Louis Haugh’s PhD research proposes the design and implementation of a cross-border, decentralised seed-saving network across partner community garden sites in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Framing community gardens as environmental and social commons, the project examines how collaborative seed stewardship can strengthen food sovereignty, biodiversity resilience, and cultural knowledge, particularly among migrant and minority growers whose food traditions are centred within the network.

Through embedded practice-based visual research, including photography, moving image, and participatory co-creation, the project generates artistic outputs that function as independent forms of knowledge production, culminating in a major public event in year three developed in partnership with Project Arts Centre, Dublin.

The research addresses policy friction across differing governance frameworks and aligns with key UN Sustainable Development Goals. Ultimately, it proposes a scalable commons-based model that can inform local authority planning, support decolonial approaches to food production, and demonstrate the capacity of artistic practice to drive meaningful ecological and social policy change.

Regenerative Textiles: Field-to-Field Circularity and Community-Led Bioeconomies for Climate Adaptation

This research will investigate regenerative textile systems as both design-led practice and ecosystem infrastructure, exploring how embodied textile making contributes to place-based fibre networks and community-led bioeconomies. While regenerative textile frameworks increasingly address material systems and circularity, the role of making as a form of knowledge production - how weaving generates relational understanding, cultural meaning and ecological care - remains underexplored. Through studio practice, material experimentation, participatory action research, co-design, interviews, and ecosystem mapping, the project will examine how weaving and collaborative textile processes generate material, relational, and ecological knowledge. Working across studio, community, and regional scales, the research will build upon emerging all-island fibre initiatives and partnerships to investigate how textile design may operate as connective infrastructure within regenerative systems. By positioning embodied textile practice as central to the enactment and cultural embedding of regenerative systems, the project offers a community-centred pathway toward more connected, materially responsive textile infrastructures.