Deirdre O’Mahony talks FARMWORK, climate crisis, Kerr’s Pinks and the future of food as exhibition continues at Void

A selection of works made by the award-winning Kilkenny-based artist, FARMWORK is a collection from the past decade that reflects her interest in the politics of landscape, rural sustainability and food security, challenging mainstream narratives around agricultural matters and policy.

Some of the works focus on the history of agricultural development locally and the efforts of one man, John Silke, to build up the seed potato industry in Donegal. Silke is the man we have to thank for the introduction of the famous Kerr’s Pinks potato variety to the North West in the early 20th century.

As the exhibition approaches the end of its run at Void the ‘Journal’ caught up with Deirdre to ask about her work.

Can you tell us a little about your art practice?

For over 30 years I have been making work across sculpture, painting, installation and participatory projects. At the centre of this work is my interest in the politics of landscape, rural/urban relationships, rural sustainability and food security.

I have investigated the political ecology of rural places through public engagement, exhibitions, critical writing, and cultural production. From large-scale paintings produced by tracing the shadows of boulders in the contested context of the Burren National Park in the West of Ireland, to setting up community spaces amongst a charged local conflict, I have focused on creating public space to bring together diverse communities and alternate forms of knowledge, embracing art as a critical space to help us see things differently.

It is no longer possible to consider landscape without taking account of climate change and biodiversity collapse. Drawing on design philosopher Tony Fry’s idea of the 'Sustainment' as an equivalent movement to the Enlightenment in transforming systems of thought and behaviours, in 2020, the Sustainment Experiments project focused on food security and farming, testing ideas on how to open a public discussion on farming, food production and consumption.

Through a range of activities, sculptural plantings, feast events and on-the ground research, creating public space for collectively reimagining the future of farming as climate change becomes an irreversible fact.

The outcome of this process was a sound and moving image project, The Quickening originally exhibited in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity Collage Dublin in 2024, and now at Void Arts Centre, which brought together conversations, original music and moving image alongside the voice of insect and soil life; a polyvocal response to the most urgent questions affecting land and its inhabitants, reflecting an idea of being-in-common that encompasses all living beings.

'Kerr's Pinks' is a particularly resonant phrase for this writer and many in the north west. What brought you to John Silke in the first place?

I spent about 10 years working on a project called SPUD.

I was interested in using a potato to investigate and reflect on ideas of sustainability and food security. I originally started working on SPUD because of a project called X-PO, where I reopened a rural post office as a social and cultural exchange point for different communities in the Burren.

There were many discussions about how people used to grow food, and potato growing that have fallen out of use. That led to a project that looked at the potato ridge as a kind of lost technology that enabled so many people to survive from the potato prior to the famine.

As with most of my projects one thing led to another and this led to my delving deeply into the role of the potato both in Irish culture and within global history.

Part of the research involved looking for books and I had a kind of standing request in a bookshop in Galway called Charlie Burns' and anything that came in that they thought might be of interest, they put it for aside and that’s how I came across the book by Father John Silke, and the seed potato industry, and how it had been started by his father in Donegal and more or less allowed to collapse after his father retired.

Coincidentally, I was working in the same place as Father Silke’s nephew and he was able to connect me directly with Father Silke, so I was able to go and interview him while he was still alive

I was fascinated by the story of John Silke who put in an extraordinary effort to ensuring that farmers in a very impoverished part of Ireland, could earn a living from growing seed potatoes.

This part of the world has been a centre of the seed potato industry in Ireland for a long time. What's your assessment of the health of the industry today?

I’m not a scientist and I’m not a farmer, but I know from just looking at the fields and speaking to farmers that the weather is making it extremely difficult for those growing potatoes.

In the exhibition, there’s a body of work called ‘Farm photographs’ and words by farmers all over the world, including research done specially for this exhibition. One of the farmers said:

“Now, we're farming the weather more than we’re the farming the field. If you get up in the morning, say I'm going to start to dig potatoes, and at 10 o'clock there's a thunder burst. Everything stops.

"And then you can't go the next day, or maybe the next day, you know. And it just gets wetter and wetter, and then the potatoes start to rot in the ground.” The health of the industry is dependent on the weather and the climate is changing.

Do you think agriculture production has sometimes been neglected as a subject in art? The roots of culture and cultivation are the same so it's appropriate farming is front and centre of the current exhibition.

I think landscape has been a subject for art for hundreds of years but farming less so other than a high static image of farming which bears little or no reality no relationship to the reality.

I’m really interested in how agriculture and culture have become so separate and yet as you say the roots of culture and cultivation are the same and I suppose this is something I picked up on during the SPUD project and did my work, which was looking at how our practice could reflect the reality of rural places today.

The kind of changes going on at the moment because of globalised food production are playing out on the ground in real places where it’s increasingly difficult to earn a living from farming.

Rural communities are increasingly becoming dormitories for cities and towns so rural places are no longer sites of production other than cultural production and by that, I mean that the trend towards farm diversification and farms as tourism and leisure is becoming increasingly common.

A concern is that the kind of social mechanisms that used to support farmers are dying out. For example, local marts, a weekly point of contact with neighbours are now largely a thing of the past, rural pubs which can no longer be used because of changing enforcement of drink-driving laws – not that I’ve anything against drink-driving laws but it has had a significant impact on how people socialise – and lack of access to the support mechanisms that allow people to live in rural places are presenting enormous challenges.

I mean things like rural GPs and the increased centralisation of medical and health services. All of this seems very far removed from the role of culture within agriculture, and agriculture within culture but I believe that art has a role to play in communicating what is happening on the ground, the very real issues affecting farming communities and the impact that it’s having to both people in places.

Food sustainability is probably more important now than ever before. When you look at our own history the shift from a predominantly oat-based to a potato-based diet led to a population explosion and then catastrophe with the blight and Great Hunger in the 1840s. Are there lessons for us today?

The lessons from an overdependence on monoculture are there to be read in Irish history. We now depend on 12 major food producers, global agriculture businesses for most of the food that we eat and are dependent on.

That frightens me as climate change takes hold the onus will be on us as individuals to play our part in contributing to becoming independent or semi-independent of these global food suppliers.

With the Great Famine in Ireland it was the spread of a virus from South America to Mexico to Europe and subsequently to Ireland that caused that famine. The biggest problem in Ireland was our dependence or the dependence of the majority of the population for the potato as the sole source of food.

We are now dependent on the 12 major food producers as our source of food. We have to break that dependency. The SPUD project was about thinking about that relationship between the past and the present and the lessons that we should be putting into practice right now, even if all you do is grow potatoes in a bucket or salad on a windowsill. We can all grow something.

And quite aside from the pleasure that it brings through taste, touching soil, seeing something grow and change, it’s also good for a mental health, our bodies and for our children to see where our food comes from.

None of us are more than a generation or two from the land or the sea in Ireland and foodstuffs and farming have been at the centre of much lore and song - herrings and potatoes for example. Is this something you have considered in the course of your work?

Farming may have been a subject of artist’s practice, but all too often it is presented through a romantic objectification of the subject; agriculture has rarely been addressed in its full complexity as a subject.

FARMWORK is about thinking in public about some of the issues affecting food production and farming, whether soil quality, the climate crises, or the history of agricultural modernisation in Donegal.

Have you enjoyed your time working in Derry and Donegal?

Loved it!