Community-led communication network
Storm Meitheal workshop
14 October 2026
Join us for a free workshop, discussion, and jar swap considering pickles and preserves. We will learn techniques and best practices with award-winning food producer Gypsy Gifford and food-based artist Amy Bunce.
When? Wednesday 21 October, 6—8pm
When a storm hits, we can lose power. After months of storing up food for winter in freezers, we have to watch as it melts away, cooking as much as possible on portable gas stoves. Supermarkets might also lose stock, and fresh food can become hard to locate when roads are inaccessible.
One way people have always dealt with maintaining food stock is to preserve, and skills of preservation have existed in Ireland for thousands of years, recorded in bog butter that is preserved in our museums. Preserves are also a community activity – nobody who makes fifteen jars of pickles would want to eat them all, but by swapping for jams or jellies, a community can have a wide range of food in a shared pantry.
Food producer Gypsy Gifford and food-based artist Amy Bunce will lead a workshop on pickling and preserving, showing techniques and best practices. Both are founding members of the Atlantic North-West Sustainable Food Group, a collective of over thirty food producers and businesses in Sligo, Leitrim, and Roscommon with a focus on local or sustainable produce. They will invite attendees to bring jars of their own, to swap, share, and taste.
Amy Bunce
Amy Bunce works with food. She runs Unwrapped, a minimal-waste mobile food business in Sligo and Leitrim and works in food education. She is a founding member of the Atlantic North-West Sustainable Food Group and has worked with food as a theme as part of a number of art projects, including the Food Library Project (Limerick, 2024), A Few Jars (Leitrim, 2024-25) and Another Infrastructure with Drop Table (Dublin, 2026), exploring themes of connection, care, and community.
Gypsy Gifford
Gypsy Gifford is a chef, a cheesemaker, a farmer, and a mother. All aspects of her work and life revolve around nourishment. In describing her culinary craft...her hands were trained with French technique, her heart was shaped by Thai fortitude, and her soul was completed by Japanese omotenashi. She weaves these aspects of her experience among multiple cultures in the food she has created across her career.
Storm Meitheal
Leitrim is experiencing more frequent and intense storms, with flooding, power cuts, and infrastructure damage that expose how dispersed rural communities can be vulnerable to climate impacts. Through a series of gatherings, we are testing a set of commons-based practices and protocols that can be activated before, during, and after storms. We want to prototype a community-governed approach rooted in Leitrim’s meitheal tradition of collective labour and care.
Our thanks to lead artist Shane Finan for devising the creative workshops for Storm Meitheal. This experiment is supported by Trans Europe Halles, funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.
