
Argentina // Edinburgh
Irene Aldazabal (b. 1993, Argentina) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher living in Scotland. She is pursuing her PhD at the University of Edinburgh, in cross-school collaboration between the College of Art (ECA) and the School of Biological Sciences, funded by the ECA PhD Scholarship. Her doctoral inquiry focuses on plants’ rhythmicities and biological cycles to reimagine our understandings of time through sculpture practice, in ways that consider multispecies coexistence and earthly wellbeing.
Her work has been shown in South America and Europe including venues such as Edge of Matter (UK, 2025), the Valencia Botanical Garden (Spain, 2023), Fungaria (Argentina, 2024) and Hidden Door Festival (UK, 2023); and publications in academic journals in Ecuador (posts, 2022) and the UK (EAR, 2023). Previous studies include a Fine Arts Licenciatura and Teaching degrees, at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata; and an Arts & Humanities master’s at the University of Dundee (Global Excellence Scholarship 2021-22)
Driven by the temporal and ecological relations that transpire in our collective ecosystems, in my artistic practice I engage with living processes and dynamic territories.
Since 2017, I have been exploring notions of living sculptures and fragile assemblages. I experiment with earthly materials, and seek to stay close to more-than-human organisms, such as fungi or plants, attempting to learn from and with them. These experiences have led me to conversations with experts in other fields —life, environmental and social sciences— and, consequently, to consider an interdisciplinary and interknowledge approach. Eco-social and biological cycles have become vital figures in my work and inquiry. My current doctoral research brings together arts, chronobiology and environmental humanities to investigate multispecies and ecological dimensions of time through sculpture practice.
Site-specific and walking practices are another, yet closely related, line of artistic exploration I follow. In these, I find meaningful ways to apprehend my own personal trajectories —from the Andean-Patagonian mountains to the Dundee riverscapes or Edinburgh hills and sea—and embodied temporalities —daily, seasonal— in relation to others, human and non-human.
While my focus is mainly in sculpture and its embodied and affective features, my ‘thinking-though-doing’ processes also integrate drawing, photography and botanical illustration. Artist books have become a medium where to poetically record and expand my research projects and transitory artworks.