‘It has shone a light on rural culture’

IRELAND’S complex relationship with the humble potato is examined in Deirdre O’Mahony’s film ‘The Persistent Return’ which is showing at the Carlow exhibition.

“I wanted to look at the bigger picture of the potato and how it arrived in to Europe from South America and how it fuelled population growth in Ireland before the famine and fuelled the economic expansion of Europe,” she says.

Deirdre hopes that the work can help start a conversation around food sustainability.

“We are experiencing a lot of extreme weather conditions, so what drives our practice of food creation will have to change. We need to figure out how we can become more secure,” she says.

She has teamed up with Teagasc to host a series of talks with stakeholders to discuss how farming challenges can be met.

“They’ll be about sharing knowledge and ideas of what we can do to solve issues. It’ ll bridge that gap between agriculture and culture — after all agriculture has the word culture in it, so there has been and always will be that connection”.

This is not the first rural project the Limerick woman has undertaken. In 2007 she transformed the closed post office in Kilnaboy, Co Clare in her project ‘X-PO’ to make it once again a meeting point for people.

“It was all based around the idea of reviving that incidental meeting place where people can just meet each other,” she says.

The Encountering the Land exhibition has given a voice to an at times invisible rural Ireland, she says.

“It has brought people who don’t normally go to exhibitions in to the gallery, which can only be a positive thing, and has shone a light on rural culture, which I feel is often a guilty secret and of course has given a voice to women.”