First Fridays

Last Winter, Amach – To The Field told the story of twenty-one townlands across Leitrim. Each door came from a house or shed on that townland that then sat in a field waiting for you to open it. On the door, you found a phone number. Dial it and you heard the farmer and families of that townland tell you the story of the land on which you stand. To find out more about the project, you can visit: edwinaguckian.com

Orla Barry writes, makes performances, video and sound installations. Her work focuses on language, both written and spoken, as well as its visual deconstruction and displacement— via frequently associative techniques. Fiction, auto ethnography and oral history are blended to reflect on the culture of disconnection from the natural environment and the boundaries of art and the rural everyday. Barry plays with the fractured relationship between agriculture, gender and the natural world. But her work also deals with the materiality of words and approaches to writing and speaking to accentuate this physical and embodied understanding of language as form.

Her recent solo exhibitions include MuZee, Ostend; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; ARGOS Centre for Art and Media, Brussels; and mother's tankstation, Dublin. Her work has been shown at EVA International and the RHA Dublin, and performed at KAAI Theatre, Brussels; Museum M, Leuven; SMAK, Gent; IMMA, Dublin; Dublin Theatre Festival; Project Arts Centre, Dublin; South London Gallery; Tate Modern, London; and De Appel, Amsterdam.

Gerry Bohan is a writer and suckler farmer. He tends to his cattle on the same land that his family have farmed for many generations. In a collaboration with visual artist Anna Macleod, and supported by the Arts Council, his work has culminated into a series of short stories which along with four other stories were published in his book called The Clainings Tree and Other Stories. One of those stories won Gerry the MJ Mc Manus Literary Award. Gerry was one of the coordinators of The Leitrim Hawthorn Project supported by the Heritage Council in 2023. Stories told by Gerry as part of Amach To The Field have aired on national radio shows.

Keith Brennan is a farmer and writer who lives and works on Hawthorn Hill Farm, a small mixed farm in North Roscommon. They raise sheep and goats for direct sale as well as honeybees and fruit and vegetables to feed their family. Hawthorn Hill Farm is a no spray, no artificial fertiliser farm. The farm has recorded over 60 species of wildflowers. Keith has spotted over 40 species of birds foraging, roosting or resting on the farm. Buzzards and Sparrowhawks quarter the skies. Pine martens and red foxes quarter the fields hunting lambs and red squirrels.

Keith is always trying to find ways to weld old technologies and practices to modern understanding with the view of creating a farm that can grow food, sustain habitat and generate some kind of profit. Keith sees farming as dependent on nature, economics as dependent on ecology and the farm as a way of reflecting on those understandings.Keith is currently working on a book about farming and nature.

Notes from Sheepland (directed by Cara Holmes; duration 70 mins) bursts with candid observations of lipstick-wearing, always-swearing, no-nonsense artist and shepherd, Orla Barry. Through her fields, her digital diaries, and the pedigree sheep she cares for, we discover how the art is in the doing.

Orla Barry is a self-confessed ovine addict. She is a decade in sheep, she’s still wondering what possessed her to start but yet she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Orla lived in Brussels for sixteen years and now lives and works in South East Ireland where she runs a flock of pedigree Lleyn sheep.

Her work deals with the tensions of being an artist and an eco-farmer in rural Ireland. The sheep have slowed her art career but, at the same, caring for them has hugely inspired it. She escapes the studio by going to the sheep, escapes the sheep by hiding in her studio. Notes from Sheepland follows Orla, an outlier, as she floats between these worlds. It reflects upon the primal, poetic and unpredictable bond she has with the natural world.