Through a doorway off a courtyard that you reach via a lane beyond the busy streets of a hot, dusty Paris is a vast world of ice. Meltwater drips inside a glacial cave, where sharp facets glitter and shadows lurk, masking unknowable depths. Above, light leads outside, where the landscape is made up of jagged fissures in blue, white and grey, stretching to vanishing point. “I’m holding on to that possibility that there is something that can be done,” says the artist Clare Langan, whose most recent film, Earthbound, imagines the aftermath of a future ice age.In her four-screen installation, which is premiering at the Irish Cultural Centre in the city, a young woman wakes up, as if from hibernation, to discover the melting glaciers and icefields revealing almost archaeological discoveries: preserved birds and plants, as well as human detritus, the artefacts of our presence through time. Watching the world during the pandemic led Langan to realise that nature can regenerate. “There was a stillness. Certain insects came back. There was this element of rewilding, of regeneration and transformation. It is a possibility.”The term Anthropocene, which entered common usage at the turn of the millennium, is used to characterise our current era, in which humanity has become the primary force of planetary change. “There are a lot more artists talking about it now,” Langan says. What has altered for her is the inclusion of that possibility for hope. Made from 1999 onwards, the award-winning artist’s film trilogy Forty Below, Too Dark for Night and The Glass Hour explored the effects of climate change, always with the teasing and intelligent ambiguity that characterises her work.That trilogy, now in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, shows, respectively, the impacts of a vast lava flow, encroaching desert and deluge. The works cause ideas to form in your mind, without belabouring or didactic messaging, but there is an element of bleakness to them that’s absent from Earthbound. “You can’t go round being the horseman of the apocalypse,” Langan says as we talk outside in the spring sunshine of Paris. “As humans we’re resilient, and resilience and hope go hand in hand. You get knocked down, you stand up.” Clare Langan, Earthbound, at Centre Culturel Irlandais Alongside the hope there is beauty, as Langan’s awakened figure runs her hand in wonder across the ice, then, reaching for the light, emerges into the whitened world.The artist has been thinking about fossils emerging from preverbal, prehistorical times, their origins and stories pieced together by scholars. “I was looking at how much we can preserve, and see and learn from them, and then imagined what it is we’re leaving behind for a future explorer to find, with our plastic that is not going to disappear, and our animals that are already extinct. This is an emotional, a poignant moment.”Part of the brilliance of Langan’s always haunting work is that balance of her meticulously professional and intelligent approach with her admission of emotion. Her aesthetics are exceptional, but there is far more to her films and installations than surface beauty. As the four elements of Earthbound play around you, you are immersed in its world but also sense that something is happening just out of view. There are fleeting glimpses, the mesmerisingly exquisite feathers of a frozen bird, an umbrella, a plastic bottle, a light bulb, held as if in amber but instead in ice. “The human character adds a sense of relationship and emotion. It signifies our place in the world,” Langan says. “The cave is claustrophobic, but then she’s tiny in the landscape.”Clare Langan, Bird, Plastic Bottle Ice Fossil Earthbound, 2026; Digital Print, Frameless Light-Box Edition Clare Langan, Moth Ice Fossil 1, Earthbound, 2026. Size and Medium: 90x60cm; Digital Print, Frameless Light-Box Edition, clarelangan.com Born in Dublin and now based in Co Kerry, Langan studied at the National College of Art and Design before a Fulbright scholarship brought her to complete a film course at New York University. Returning to Ireland, she worked in the art department on films that included Braveheart, Far and Away and Some Mother’s Son before realising that art was where her true passion lay. “It was an amazing education, because I saw how teams worked together,” she says.She still has close friends from those days, and a core collaborator from the outset has been cinematographer Robbie Ryan, whose film credits include Poor Things and The Favourite. “A producer introduced us. He was this enthusiastic, experimental guy. We bought a Bolex [camera] and used my hand-painted filters in front of the lens.“I’m lucky,” Langan says, “that he still wants to come on my shoots. He calls them my ‘boot camps’, because they are really hard.” She laughs, describing the process of filming in Iceland, the tiny team trekking up the glacier and into the ice cave, everyone helping to lug the equipment. “Robbie is brilliant, and that’s the thing about film: it’s collaborative. Everyone brings their things to the table.” In this instance, “everyone” also includes the editor Adam Finch, who is best known for his work with the British artist and film-maker Isaac Julien; the composers Gyda Valtýsdóttir and Úlfur Hansson; and the curator Heinz Peter Schwerfel. Clare Langan, Glacier Wall, Beacon, Earthbound, 2026. Size and Medium: 80x120m; Digital Print on Archival Paper. Halbe Frame with museum glass Clare Langan, Melting Glacier 1, Earthbound, 2026. Size and Medium: 80x120m; Digital Print on Archival Paper. Halbe Frame with museum glass. Back in the darkened exhibition space at the Irish Cultural Centre, a small bubble of ice looks like an alien face, another a sleeping creature. A whole world of wonder appears in a single droplet of water. The human figure holds up a torch, or perhaps it’s a smartphone.Perspectives shift and scale alters. The figure climbs; she drinks the meltwater, then drinks in the daylight. Sounds move about. Patterns in the ice look like hieroglyphics, their hues set against the warm tones of living skin. A handprint could be a future fossil being formed. We cannot help but leave a trace. The red silk of the figure’s cloak is echoed in the feathers of a bird. Later she will wave it, like a beacon – or perhaps a warning that humanity is coming back. While Langan filmed on location in Iceland, she also created ice sculptures back at her home studio, where she has two freezers, one for food and one for some of the subjects of her work. “That one can be a bit of a horror show,” she says, smiling, and I’m reminded that the late artist and film-maker David Lynch always said he had something similar going on in his freezer at home. “We find what drives us,” Langan says. “It changes over time, but I am very immersed in what I do.”Clare Langan, Earthbound, Multi Screen Installation Centre Culturel Irlandais 2026, centreculturelirlandais.com Clare Langan, Earthbound, Multi Screen Installation Centre Culturel Irlandais 2026 She is driven but knows herself well enough to realise when to leaven things. When not on location, she spends mornings intensely working, while afternoons bring walks, which she describes as “my balancing point”. The Ireland Invites programme put together by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Hugh Lane and Culture Ireland brings curators to Ireland, and the biennial EVA International invites an international guest curator every two years, but Ireland is nonetheless a small country, geographically on the periphery of Europe. Showing in Paris gives Langan the chance to connect with larger networks. She has already represented Ireland at international biennales and this is work that deserves to be seen on the widest of stages. Since Forty Below, more than 25 years ago, her work has had an increasing urgency, and the conversations it creates are ones with which more and more artists and writers are becoming involved. Clare Langan, Earthbound, Multi Screen Installation Centre Culturel Irlandais 2026 Clare Langan, Glacier Panoramic 1, Earthbound, 2026. Size and Medium: 80x120m; Digital Print on Archival Paper. Halbe Frame with museum glass. clarelangan.com “It is shocking and sad,” Langan says, considering the state of the planet. “And there is so much going on you would really feel like this is the end of it. But I think you cannot. That’s part of the human spirit. It’s part of the soul.”Earthbound is on show daily from 2pm to 6pm at the Irish Cultural Centre/Centre Culturel Irlandais, in Paris, until Tuesday, June 30th. Ice Fossil, Bird 1, a still from the film, is included in this year’s RHA Annual Exhibition until August 9th. A series of lightboxes from the film are on view at galerie-beckers.comIreland and the arts in ParisStephen Rea in Krapp’s Last Tape at Dublin’s Project Theatre. Photograph: Alisson Rocha/Courtesy of Landmark Productions/Project Theatre When the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, visited the Irish Cultural Centre’s stand at the Paris Book Fair/Festival du Livre de Paris, at the newly renovated Grand Palais in April this year, he said, in French, that he has just one word in Irish. The gathered public waited with bated breath. What could it be? “Taoiseach,” the premier deadpanned. Give it a few years and he could possibly be adding Uachtarán to his vocabulary, but amid the overwhelming wealth of cultural things to do in the City of Light is a rich vein with an Irish inflection. The Irish Cultural Centre’s website is an excellent place to find out what’s on, there and elsewhere.During my recent visit, Jennifer Walshe premiered her work The Alonetimes, made with Philip Venables, at the newly opened Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain/Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art. Funny and moving by turns, the piece played to a rapt international audience. [ New Irish Works 2026 review: Complex group show tackles photography as an ever partial endeavourOpens in new window ]Also on show, Circulation(s), the annual festival for young European photographers at the CentQuatre venue, had an Irish focus, with work by Ellen Blair, Clodagh O’Leary, Dónal Talbot and Ruby Wallis featured. All are exciting voices in photography, and Wallis in particular is an artist to watch.As Ireland prepares to take up the EU presidency on July 1st, the Irish Cultural Centre is putting together events aimed not just at Parisian audiences but at networking Irish artists across Europe. In November, supported by Culture Ireland, it will facilitate curators from across Europe to visit artists, venues and studio groups in Dublin and Belfast.Coming up at the centre itself, TradFest, inspired by Belfast’s summer festival, runs from July 1st to 15th, with musicians including Cormac Begley, Zoë Conway and John McIntyre, as well as the Mummers of the Armagh Rhymers, Francesco Turrisi and Niwel Tsumbu.The centre’s group exhibition Everyone Should Have a Home, which explores the housing crisis, includes Avril Corroon, Adrian Duncan, Kevin Higgins, Conor Horgan, Niamh McGuinne, Clara McSweeney, the architects O’Donnell+Tuomey, Augustine O’Donohue, Eva Richardson-McCrea and Mary-Ruth Walsh. It runs from September 18th until October 28th.A separate exhibition, Gulliver 300, will be in the centre’s Old Library, celebrating the anniversary of Jonathan Swift’s book Gulliver’s Travels, in partnership with Marsh’s Library in Dublin.Elsewhere in Paris, there’s a focus on Irish theatre, dance and music at Théâtre de la Ville in the first week of December; it includes Hope Hunt by Oona Doherty, Michael Keegan-Dolan’s 1975/Naoi Déag Seachtó Cúig, and Offspring by Emily Terndrup. Stephen Rea will perform Samuel Beckett in Krapp’s Last Tape, and Michael Gallen’s opera The Curing Line will also be part of the line-up, as will be work by Jennifer Walshe and Dan Colley.