Deirdre O'Mahony
Feeder

Deirdre O’Mahony’s practise spans film, sculpture and installation, and often involves collaborating with various informal groups and stakeholders. The artist is concerned with the politics of the rural, understood as both a territory and a way of living. Her work reflects on ancestral knowledge erasure, modernisation, extractivism, utopia and the material and psychological tension between the countryside and urban areas.

Feeder is a reading room showcasing the artist’s extensive, ongoing investigation of food production under capitalism, including themes of security and sustainability. This exhibition features agricultural devices and related objects (from a trough, typically found in farm settings, to cutlery engraved with quotes from the artist’s research), books, printed matter and school desks. Of special note are the publications, amassed by the artist across a long period, which speak to ideas of generative land use, the exploitation of natural resources, alternative economic models and new ecological visions. These items offer philosophicaland environmental insights into the current situation of, and future perspectives on, agriculture in Ireland and beyond.

A screening of the film The Quickening (2024) complements this exhibition. To make it, O’Mahony organised discussions with a broad spectrum of concerned parties (from farmers to scientists to politicians), captured the conversations that took place and, with the writer Joanna Walsh, rearranged them as a libretto that is sung as a voice-over. The imagery they accompany combines expansive views of the Irish landscape with close-ups of soil ecologies, recording and amplifying the minute details of insects and microcosms. The film meditates on both industrialised agricultural activity and the centrality of land to human, animal and insect life.

Feeder was produced for the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, in 2022, and subsequently expanded and extended. This presentation is organised by SIRIUS and curated by Miguel Amado, director.