On Rural Communities
Conversation with Deirdre O'Mahony
Where did your focus and interest in the rural landscape begin?
I moved to London to study in 1976 and moved back to Ireland in the early 1990’s. When I left, rural Ireland was something that had no relevance to me anymore. On my return, filled with romantic notions of the countryside, I got a small house in Clare, very close to the Burren. I was shocked by a conflict that broke out almost immediately about the construction of an interpretive centre at Mullaghmore in the Burren National Park largely because of EU funding, and without any local consultation. That decision led to a 10-year fight in Irish and EU courts and ultimately, the partially constructed interpretive centre was deconstructed by order of the courts. Local representatives, teachers, politicians, and farm families saw it as a chance to bring an economic boost to an area where most young people had no possibility of finding work in the pre-Celtic Tiger era, and the artists, musicians, singers, writers, academics, journalists wanted an extraordinary, very special place to remain the same. The Burren Action Group who opposed the development had the ability, contacts and tools to reach a wide audience beyond the local and eventually the development was stopped but it had a significant impact on local relationships.
This was my first encounter with the two perspectives on landscape and the “inevitable tension” J. B. Jackson speaks of between the aesthetic viewer and the cultivator, and raised many questions about representative power in rural places. The fundraisers, concerts, art auctions etc all framed the Burren as a distinctly ‘other’ place. However, the role of farmers in the Burren who evolved a way of working with the land that has produced the very thing that drew people like me to go and live there, was ignored by many, and famers knowledge dismissed.
This tension is still playing out today whenever there are decisions about the regulation of land and landscape without consultion and while it took a long time, eventually shaped what I saw as my role as an artist, moving away from a practice that essentially took landscape as a subject, to working with communities to create a public space for a critical reflection on changing landscapes and land use, allowing different voices to be heard. When it comes to agricultural policy, farmers, or at least the ones I have engaged with, certainly don’t feel their voices are being heard.
‘‘When it comes to agricultural policy, farmers, or at least the ones I have engaged with, certainly don’t feel their voices are being heard.’’
As an artist you have collaborated with many different disciplines in rural communities. How do you negotiate the line between these disciplines and where do you believe your role is?
Ultimately, it takes time and negotiation. When representing other people’s stories and with academics can often be fraught as we all have different value systems. In academia, publications become a kind of currency, but they can also be used to challenge authoritative, or reductive representations. I co-wrote a couple of journal articles with Dr. Anne Byrne a sociologist from the University of Galway about a project we did fifteen years ago when I re-opened a former Post Office as a community exchange and meeting point in Killinaboy, close to the site of all the conflict in the Burren. The project started with an archival installation of the belongings of the former postmaster. Dr Byrne saw this and coincidentally had been working with a group in a townland nearby, all descendants of people whose lives were described in detail by sociologists Arnsberg and Kimball in their landmark study, ‘Family and Community in Ireland’, and ‘The Irish Countryman. The sociologist had been given the original notebooks kept by the anthropologists and was reading the first-hand accounts of life in the area with the descendants of those whose families were described in detail in the notebooks. Arnsberg and Kimball had stayed in the area on and off, for over two years but never made clear why they were there, it was assumed they were folklorists, like many who visited the area in the past. When they published their books, including the description of life in Rinnamona, many were hurt by the description of family members and were reading the notebooks with Anne Byrne, in order to make note of, and correct errors in the text.
The group asked if they could present their research at ‘X-PO’ about the anthropologist’s stay in Ireland in an archival installation, similar to that used for the opening installation, publicly complicating the official narrative enshrined in publications. It was important to acknowledge the work and the way to interrupt, or disrupt that effectively was by publishing, with the group’s approval, in peer reviewed journals, strategically using a mix of cultural, academic and community-based knowledge to collectively challenge narratives, in this case the existing study from the 1930’s.
With my projects I try to begin from a position of knowing nothing. I am not a farmer, I am not a sociologist, I am not a scientist. This lack of any ‘useful’ sectoral agency allows me to enter into different disciplinary spaces. However, I am deeply conscious that bring my own biases to the table when comes to framing or re-framing narratives. With ’X-PO’, I was doing my PhD, so made it clear from the outset that I would run the project for the first eight months and then, if desired, it could be run by a team within the community. However, as I initiated it, and my name was associated with it, the cultural capital rested with me. This certainly led to some issues, when the project became widely known some felt that I was being extractive, which I was, to an extent as it was the focus of my PhD. Those who used the space all had access to what I wrote and the opportunity to correct and make amendments if desired, though few did, something I attribute more to a reluctance to interfere with an academic text than approval for what was written.
Does community / public engagement play a role in your critical thinking /design approach?
Absolutely, perceptions of the function of landscape are seen differently from within and outwith communities. As an artist my role is about negotiating this line, sometimes challenging or complicating reductive perspectives, other times making visible invisible perspectives and voices. ‘Sustainment Experiments’, was a series of public experiments that reflected Design theorist Tony Fry’s idea of the Sustainment that can bring about an equivalent paradigmatic shift in human behaviour as the Enlightenment. If we are to survive, our behaviour must consider the knowledge that the earth is a shared space for humans and more-than-human.
The experiments began with a potato planting ‘PLOT 1’ with the Loy Association outside VISUAL, Carlow, later planted with a drought resistant, methene and parasite reducing fodder called Sainfoin, which was used to open a conversation with farmers about regenerative agriculture. The project extended into hosting two feasts for farmers, policymakers and scientists, three groups that seldom sit at the same table. It took over two years of research and planning, alongside making a porcelain dinner service - an amateur kind of making which comes back to the notion of not claiming mastery over every subject – which also became a kind of thinking space for the project. I engraved knives with statements from research, and planned the menu courses as prompts. There was a performative element within the feasts, and curator Etaoin Holahan played the role of the Bean An Tí (Lady of the House), alongside artist Bridget O’Gorman, who played the Fool and didn’t have a seat at the table. They both intervened as required, where people dominated the conversation and pushed attendees to move beyond their default positions. No alcohol was served. The conversations between farmers, policy makers and scientists revolved around what kind of policies are being advocated by the state. There is a lot of scepticism about multispecies and regenerative farming practices because of indecisive agricultural policies advocating scaled up dairy production dependant on rye grass and chemical inputs and the pros and cons of transitioning to regenerative agricultural systems. These conversations reflect what is actually happening—probably the conversation that is happening in every co-operative in the country and the feasts a way of creating a space to talk about how farming has to change. All participants were advised that the conversations would be recorded and transcribed, and 18 hours of transcriptions of conversations were distilled into a libretto for a film called ‘The Quickening’ where those human voices met the more-than-human world through sound recordings gathered from different soils and farms; animals, dung beetles, ants and worms. Visually the film spans between drone footage to extreme close-ups of life in the soil; the dung beetles worms, etc.
‘‘There is a lot of scepticism about multispecies and regenerative farming practices because of indecisive agricultural policies advocating scaled up dairy production dependant on rye grass and chemical inputs...’’
Your work could be categorised as activism—is influencing policy something you pursue in your work?
The second Sustainment Experiments feast was around State and EU policy and called ‘Eat Food Policy’. Each course reflected aspects of agricultural and food policies devised with with a cook. It is a collaborative process. I wanted the work to operate on different registers; engaged with powerful institutions such as Trinity College and on a local level in the South East, on farms and in community centres, within the context in which it was made. It was
Your work advocates for small scale regenerative farming practices. How do you envisage the future of farming in Ireland in the face of economic pressures on these types of farms?
Regenerative farming practices can bring gains not just for food quality, therefore human health and soil ecology. In the newspaper that accompanies the exhibition there are interviews with six farmers, each with a very different approach. But within each interview the same thread keeps reappearing about the priorities of the state versus the realities on the ground. Subsides play a massive role in this, they cannot survive without them, primarily because they are selling at below cost, the price farmers get for produce from the main supermarket and other retailers is far too low, yet consumers have come to expect cheap, below cost food, what also change needs to change is consumer behaviour.
‘‘Regenerative farming practices can bring gains not just for food quality, therefore human health and soil ecology.’’
Can you speak about your recent project 'Model Plot' and how your collaboration with the Loy Association of Ireland came about?
The Loy Association found me! I had been working on a project called SPUD using the potato ridge to highlight issues around food security and seed sovereignty, and was invited to do a participative project, a temporary famine memorial, at the National Famine Museum in Strokestown, County Roscommon. The form of the sculptural planting was an X, made from two 50 metre ridges situated between the Strokestown House and the mausoleum of the Mahon family, who were responsible for the deportation and death of up to 70% of their tenants who left Strokestown for Canada in so-called coffin-ships. The planting was a public event for anybody who wished to learn about potato ridges. The Loy Association got in touch and said they would like to come and I realised very rapidly that my knowledge of how to make a potato ridge was extremely limited. They took over, teaching participants how to use the loy. Since that time, I have made several projects with members of the Loy Association, initially as participants, and over time, as collaborators.
‘A Village Plot’ was the next work made with the group, as part of the residency programme at IMMA that ran alongside Grizedale Art’s ‘A Fair Land’. My calculations for the initial proposal were incorrect but members of the Loy Association worked out how to execute it correctly. A group including Gerry Mullins, John Whyte and Gerry Browne, have since become mentors and collaborators along with seven others I regularly work with. This IMMA project was a way of revaluing tacit knowledge, often seen as a form of “Stupid Knowledge” and tensions between enlightenment values and scientific progress, which brought huge benefits in terms of health and food production, but also brought us to the present climate and biodiversity crises that we are in today.
A different configuration for a much larger, more complex work ‘Model Plot’, was commissioned as part of ‘Field Exchange’, a Creative Ireland Climate Call project in 2022. Located on Brookfield Farm in County Tipperary the sculptural planting was designed to activate conversations with farmers by highlighting a technology, born out of the need for food security in Ireland’s past, the ridges, and look forward to herb and forage crops that point a way to climate resilience in farming. Four large diamond frames at the heart of the planting were sown with legumes and herb forage crops; Sainfoin, Birdsfoot Trefoil, Vetch and Phacelia. Each crop has a practical value for farmers; fixing nitrogen in the soil, benefiting animal and soil health, or sustaining pollinators and the environment. Over the course of the project, the planting changed, shifting focus from the potato at the beginning to the herb and legume crops after harvest which reflected in a tangible way, the impact of the driest summer on the crops. Weekly on-farm exchanges covered different topics. A further variation, ‘The Model Plot’, has now been acquired by the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and will be made with members of the group as part of the Museum’s collections exhibition in 2025. END
About the Contributor:
Deirdre O’Mahony is a visual artist living in Ireland. Public artworks X-PO (2007- ) and SPUD (2009–2019) both reflected on the broader tensions between knowledge erasure and agricultural modernisation. She is a graduate of St Martins School of Art, London, Crawford College, Cork and completed a PhD at the University of Brighton in 2012.
COLLABORATOR: Deirdre O’Mahony
ILLUSTRATIONS: BothAnd Group
SUPPORTERS: Arts Council of Ireland through Agility Award 2023