The Climate and Health Alliance have developed a position paper outlining the health impacts of air pollution. This paper makes a series of recommendations across infrastructure, health services and communications to combat the health issues associated with air pollution. As a continuation of my work with air quality, I was asked to create the visuals and graphics for this paper and its associated summary document.

An all-Ireland coalition of organisations and institutions, the Climate and Health Alliance formed in 2019 to highlight the health impacts of climate change while emphasising the health benefits accrued from climate action, such as improved air quality, greater physical activity, and more sustainable diets. The alliance does this through political campaigning, awareness raising and research.

No AI was used in the creation of these visuals.

Working with the team at the Sustainability Institute on creating and maintaining a library with curated resources for students, educators, policy makers and other stakeholders. Part of this was creating a resource hub that was visually easy to use and look at. The landing page animation represents the forms of marine pollution described: underwater noise, microplastics, PFAS and nutrient input. This initiative is part of the EU-funded SOS-Zeropol Hub-project that aims at investigating various forms of marine pollution and finding solutions to tackling them.

No AI was used in the creation of these visuals.

The eco-museum LIVE in Iveragh commissioned Aperture Media to do an educational animation video on the geological history of the Iveragh peninsula in Kerry. The latter asked me to create visuals and animations for this. County Kerry has some spectacular geology sites and the goal was to feed the imagination of the viewer allowing them to see what the area looked like hundreds of millions of years ago.

Fortunately, I had already visited the relevant locations a few times before, so I started developing concept art early. I illustrated and modeled all elements from scratch – an exception was the myriapod that capable animation student and Aperture Media-intern Emma O’Keefe illustrated and animated.

Having plenty of creative freedom on this, I played with a range of animation techniques from rigged 3D-character animation to standard 2D-animation to frame-by-frame animation.

No AI was used in the creation of these visuals.

A science outreach project conceptualised and created by former UCC palaeontologist Dr Aude Cincotta and myself. Starting as a passion project, we applied for and received funding in 2021 from Geological Survey Ireland to create all relevant materials and an online platform to communicate Cork’s geological heritage to the wider public. This involved surveying Cork for natural and cultural heritage sites and working with scholars, local historians, quarry staff, artists, web developers and editors in creating educational content and promotional content.

A particular focus was on turning decades of scholarly work into content that non-geologists could understand while respecting terminology and conventions of the field. Thus we checked in with both UCC scholars and Geological Survey Ireland to make sure the content was aligned with current knowledge on the local geology.

A major task for me in particular was feeding the audience’s imagination with animations and 3D-rendered visualisations of Cork’s prehistoric environments. Finally, we uploaded photogrammetrically scanned 3D-models of key rock types for viewers to interact with and virtual geoheritage tours they could undertake.

This has carried over to a project for Cork City Council in 2023, where I developed a geological heritage brochure to summarise Cork’s geological heritage.

The material created has also been used to lead in-person geological heritage tours every year 2021-2025 as part of the city’s annual Heritage Week. From my experience with this project, there’s great interest in geology in Cork, and it’s been a pleasure encouraging more people to immerse themselves with local natural heritage through the rocks of the area.

No AI was used in the creation of these visuals.

The staff at VOICE Ireland are incredibly busy working with environmental policies and awareness in Ireland. They’re behind many campaigns and policies progressing Ireland towards becoming a more sustainable and environmentally friendly place.

I helped create visual content and 3 animated videos for their No Plastic. Period.-campaign that they could use for online media and for offline communication on-site at events, organisations and institutions. The campaign material aimed at convincing people to avail of reusable menstrual products and at showing how they’re used.

I felt fortunate to be awarded this job as a person who has no first-hand experience with periods and menstrual products. A key thing we wanted to tackle were the visual taboos (ever noticed how pads in ads are often shown to absorb cartoonishly blue liquids? Well, I hadn’t). We discussed colours and overall mood to reflect something that seemed pretty straightforward without being too triggering for more conservative audiences.

No AI was used in the creation of these visuals.

From June to November 2021, I was contracted by the Gay Project to develop ‘Crossroads’ – a small research project where I completed qualitative interviews of LGBTQ+ people of colour in Cork. The name was suggested by another queer activist to hint at the Irish tradition of meeting people at actual crossroads from different areas.

Using the analytical and research approaches I learned during my Master’s programme in African Studies, I wanted to provide a contemporary look into how certain people experienced life in Cork and to describe attitudes of discrimination met.

The final report highlights issues groups with different intersectionalities, primarily brown queer people, go through in Cork society (and also mentions good things) and suggests a look at current policies and attitudes towards integration in Europe. 

Finally, I did a small communications and press tour being interviewed locally, regionally and nationally about the campaign.

No AI was used in the creation of these visuals.

2026 | Thomas Heising