Lisa Fingleton: An artist embedded with eco-minded farmers on the Dingle Peninsula
Lisa Fingleton and John Joe Fitzgerald during the filming of Voices from the Field/Guthanna ón nGort. Picture: Chris Garrett
Art and farming may seem like unlikely bedfellows, but Lisa Fingleton combines both in a career that also finds room for book writing and filmmaking. Working from the Barna Way, the small farm outside Ballybunion, Co Kerry, she manages with her partner, the photographer Rena Blake, Fingleton has recently completed work on a film project called Voices from the Field/Guthanna ón nGort.
Voices from the Field/Guthanna ón nGort, currently showing at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, follows ten farming families on the Dingle peninsula as they engage with the effects of climate change. The film was commissioned by the Dingle Hub, and was one of 15 projects funded by Creative Ireland whose brief was to embed artists in local communities and produce creative climate action projects.
“The Dingle Hub was approved for funding without having an artist attached,” says Fingleton. “I was one of about 40 who applied to participate. I did a series of interviews with farmers and made a submission and I was selected.
“For the first five or six months, myself and Caitriona Fallon, the project manager, went around visiting farms. We were still in Covid. I suppose we were trying to build up trust with the farmers. Sitting in sheds, we’d be chatting about what was going on for them, and identifying what their issues were around climate change. It was a slow process. I often went back later and drew, or took photographs, or we’d just have cups of tea and chat some more.”
As restrictions lifted, arrangements were made for the ten farmers to visit other agricultural ventures. “We went on familiarisation trips to different places that we thought might be inspiring in terms of diversifying their income and doing interesting things that are good for the planet. The farmers usually had their partners and children along as well, so we had 25 on most of those visits. I like to say we had 250% participation.”
Fingleton found an easy affinity with the participants, having herself grown up on a farm in the Midlands. “I found some old diaries a while ago, pictures from when I was nine, drawing Daddy on the harvester.”
She studied art in school, but It would never have occurred to her to take her interest further. “No one I knew was a practicing artist, and I knew nothing about art college,” she says. “So I went on to study Business and French, and got involved in community youth work. I worked with Travellers’ projects and migrants’ and women’s groups for seven years. I was actually using art all the time, but then I thought, you know something, I need to go back and do it for myself.”
Fingleton was 30 when she enrolled at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin. “At that time, nobody was really using video, so I had the video camera from the college to myself really. And a lot of my work was based on how things are connected through roots. My degree show was about how plants reproduce. I did a Master’s in film at Goldsmith’s College in London after that.”
Seventeen years ago, Fingleton and Blake settled on the farm that has been in Blake’s family for generations, launching the Barna Way as a certified organic project. “Half the land is in native woodland, and we’ve planted 10,000 trees,” says Fingleton. “Then we have about eight acres in native meadows. We’re trying to protect them, trying to resist the Dept of Agriculture’s attempts to make everything productive.”
As well as her film projects, Fingleton has produced a number of books on environmental themes, the latest being The Last Hug For A While and The Local Food Project. “A lot of what I do as an artist and writer is informed by being here,” she says. “I’m really lucky; my studio looks out on the polytunnels and the fields. I’m very interested in ideas about biodiversity, and how we as human beings can co-exist in a kinder way with the planet, and not be so destructive.”
The farmers featured in Voices from the Field / Guthanna ón nGort have all witnessed the effects of climate change first-hand. One was a horticulturalist, but sadly, he went out of business just as Fingleton was completing her film.
“He couldn’t compete with the cheap food that’s available in Ireland for a start. Nobody can compete with 50 cent carrots. But he’s also realised that climate change is going to get worse. He lives in the Maherees, where the land can be flooded for months at a time. They’re literally planting marram grass by hand to protect the land. He lost €30,000 one year, when he got a really bad frost in the fields, and then a bird came in from Scandinavia that he’d never seen before and cleared out his crops.”
Fingleton has seen many positive outcomes for the project, however. “Everyone involved, if they were using fertiliser, reduced their use significantly,” she says. “The grass management was big, but they were already interested in that. One of the farmers is a sheep farmer, and he’s now actively involved in looking at ways of using Irish wool. On his farm it was just being dumped into drains.
“A lot of the participants in the film have become involved in planting native hedges or trees. Two of them went on to do a course in sustainable agriculture at MTU. Some have applied for organic farming status, and more are moving towards it.”
Fingleton is pleased with the positive response there has been to her film at the Crawford. “I had a work called The Sandwich Project in the Meat & Potatoes exhibition at the Crawford last year. More than 73,000 people came in to see that show, so there’s obviously a huge interest in the issue of food production. In the end we’re all asking, how can we improve farming, how can we change? I believe that art can have a huge influence on that.”
- Lisa Fingleton’s Voices from the Field/Guthanna ón nGort was produced in partnership with the Dingle Hub, Green Arts Initiative of Ireland and Marei Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine Research and Innovation. It screens at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork until 23rd July
- Climate Conversation 5:30pm, Thursday 29 June, Crawford Art Gallery Lisa Fingleton with some of the farmers who collaborated on the film: Voices From the Field / Guthanna ón nGort.
- Further information: lisafingleton.com.
