RESIDENTS
RESOURCES
PHOTOGRAPHS


Christine Mackey

‘What can we do from this place?’
‘What future can we build together?’

Introduction
Independent visual artist studio based at Leitrim Sculpture Centre in the North-west of Ireland. Co-inciding with UNIDEE, I installed a temporary environmental project in an empty shop on main street, Manorhamilton. The plan was to occupy this space for the duration of the residency so that I could open the contextual remit of this local site to a broad international audience through the Action Research Project. Conversations would potential focus around allotments, community gardens, seed-saving, and food security. Long-term focus - set up an allotment for the town.

Disruption/Methods/Resources/Questions
2nd lock down, studio closure including project work, prohibited international travel, limited access to internet, all physical engagements ceased. Project pause – refocus through a selection of key readings. Think beyind the physical constraints imposed by the virus. Create, Contaminate, Connect, with ‘speculative fictions’, ‘multi-species engagements’ and ‘floral’ diagrammatics. Utilise on-line resources to connect with people generating informative surveys on allotments and gardening in general.

Claimed an un-occupied outdoor space for ‘public cultivation’ at the back of LSC studio complex. This ‘unloved’ space, I called the ‘nursery’. As the name suggests – a space to generate care for future plantings, seeds and other types of agri-work. Here, the politics of the ‘garden’ as a site of resistence and for the critters who inhabit and occupy these spaces filled my mind. I exit with the following quote – my question forward; “to work this soil is to sift an arcaeology of a strangers thought. Each time I find an old bulb or splinter of a broken cup planted for generation, I am thankfull for her labour’*.

labouring suggests toil, but to labour love on land gives time to work with rather then against - slow anticipated seasonal actions mindful of the where we are now – planting a future forward ‘growth’model that engages with the “medium, soil, matter, mutter, mother”**. Transforming the earth with seeds for others.

www.christinemackey.info
Participation on this residency programme was supported by the Arts Council of Ireland through there Professional Development Award (2020).

* A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
** Staying with the Trouble Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway.



TRACES
PROCESS
END OF RESIDENCY WEBZINE
ABOUT