‘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.