About
Lisa Fingleton is an artist, filmmaker, writer and grower. Her book The Local Food Project explores the power of growing and eating local food. Incorporating drawings, photography and text the book is an inspiring visual experience The book is creatively presented in journal style and is filled with ideas and actions for people who think global and want to act local.
Living and working on a small organic farm near the sea, she has spent many years cultivating deep-rooted connections between art, food and farming. Much of her work is autobiographical and deals with socio political and environmental concerns. Lisa is concerned about the fact that we are importing so much of our food and losing the capacity to be self sufficient, despite what we know about climate change and carbon footprint.
She strives to ‘be the change’ she wishes to see in the world and likes to walk the talk, grow the food and integrate life with her studio practice. For the last number of years she has been working closely with her partner Rena Blake. Together they are consciously focusing on developing The Barna Way an ecological art project on their farm. They are organising projects and events such as community tree growing, foraging, ‘meitheall’s’ and other ways of engaging local people in global issues around food, art and sustainability.
Lisa is more interested in a fluid creative process than in any rigid adherence to media. Ideas like seeds are foraged, germinated and fertilised before coming to fruition. Plants become drawings. Conversations and stories weave their way into documentaries and text. Though careful nurturing, grafting and cross pollinating, she believes we can create new paradigms a more kind, peaceful, sustainable and creative future.
Lisa received an MA in documentary film at Goldsmiths College, London in 2015. She is also a Fine Art graduate from NCAD. The Irish Film Institute hosted a special retrospective screening of her work entitled “The Power of The Personal Story” in 2015. Her solo exhibition ‘Holding True Ground’ (2018) at An Taín, Dundalk, built on her previous food projects with farmers and growers, supported by Siamsa Tire and Kerry County Council Arts Office. She is currently working on a number of projects including The Barna Way, The Floating Flagstone (Creative Ireland Kerry) and a new departure into spoken word and performaces in rsponse to the Covid 19 pandemic and climate change.
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world”
– Mahatma Gandhi
