Niamh Butler is an Irish multidisciplinary designer, artist & researcher with a background in Architecture.
After graduating from the University of Plymouth with a Masters in Architecture she designed beautiful award-winning family homes with Brennan Furlong Architects in Dublin. Having witnessed a worsening housing crisis living and working in architecture in the UK and Ireland she discovered a calling to direct her skills towards working on solutions to this.
Whilst collaborating with Alastair Parvin and others at Open Systems Lab (based in west of Ireland, London & LA) on researching new and ancient models of land ownership Niamh co-created the Atlas of Ownership: an open digital library and tool to map any type of human societies legal relationships to the earth, around the world and throughout history. The universal concepts of home emerged. The private property system based on threatening people with eviction was evidenced as something highly extractive and exploitative and a remnant of the colonial project which still prevails in many countries under the guise of the nation state.
In 2024 she is rediscovering a more hands on practice and the subtle and healing power of image and beauty, working with sustainable fashion, interiors and textiles in her native Athlone amongst the local community in Ireland after living in the UK, Portugal and a winter in Australia surfing.