For over 20 years, my eco-social practice has focused on exploring deep-rooted connections between art, food, farming, social justice, and resilience. My projects incorporate socially engaged, collaborative and performative processes, participatory moving image, large-scale drawing installations, as well as creative and autobiographical writing.
Grounded on a 19-acre organic farm with native woodland and meadows near Ballybunion in County Kerry, my partner Rena Blake and I run a project called The Barna Way. From here we engage with diverse communities of place and interest through social farming as well as live food and cultural events, while protecting habitats for wildlife. This 17-year project is propelled by an accelerated sense of urgency around food insecurity, the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and forced migration. In 2020 we planted 10,000 native trees on our land and have developed a woodland walk.
Our aim is to create cultural spaces where communities, artists, food producers, and farmers can come together to resist industrial food systems and the fallacy of ‘cheap food’ by thinking global and acting local. Through the prism of eating and growing local food, communities are invited to create a vision for transformative food ecosystems. Projects include an annual 30-day Local Food Challenge, The Portlaoise Pizza and The Sandwich Project, which recently featured on the new RTÉ series, Food Matters (2023). My book, The Local Food Project (The Barna Way, 2018), explores the power of growing and eating local food in the context of climate change and biodiversity loss.
Thanks to Dr Cathy Fitzgerald and other artists involved with the Haumea Ecoversity training programme (haumea.ie), I am trying to spend more time embedded in the land and really listening to, and learning from, the nature around us. Earlier this year, I received the Creative Work Development Award from Kerry Arts Office for a project called ‘Dyeing Earth’, which involves creating natural dyes, charcoals, and drawing materials from the land outside my studio.
I was recently the embedded artist with ‘Corca Dhuibhne Inbhuanaithe / A Creative Imagining’, one of 15 pilot projects funded by the Creative Climate Action Fund. Over 18 months, I worked in partnership with the Dingle Hub, Green Arts Initiative of Ireland, and MaREI Research Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine, to support farm families on the Dingle Peninsula to creatively look at ways in which they can respond to climate change.
One of the main issues identified by farmers was that they felt their voices were not being heard, so we decided to co-create a film. Voices From the Field / Guthanna ón nGort (2023) gives a powerful insight into the communities that work on the Dingle Peninsula to rear animals and grow produce so that our wider society may be fed and nourished. With humour, diligence, and passion, the ten farming families provide an urgent overview of the real-time consequences of climate change affecting our local ecosystems and our lives today. The film is being screened at the Crawford Art Gallery until 23 July.
As part of the Climate Action Project, we were also invited by Creative Ireland to create a 100-foot interactive drawing project at the National Ploughing Championship last September. The Creative Climate Wall was a live response to the solutions for climate change offered by hundreds of farmers in sometimes challenging weather conditions. After the Ploughing Championships, the wall was transported by the OPW to IMMA for the Earth Rising Festival, where it was installed in the Garden Galleries and carried with it traces of rain and earth from the fields of Laois. As artists, we are being asked to move “beyond the ego to the eco”. We are being asked to respond to the climate crisis and work in collaboration with nature. The Creative Climate Wall was literally drawn with nature herself.
Lisa Fingleton is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and grower based in County Kerry.
lisafingleton.com
