Kerry County Council Visual Artist in Residence is supported by Kerry County Council and The Arts Council. The residency supports time to work creatively with communities and schools as well as supporting other artists through group and individual mentoring. It also creates valuable time for me to develop new work and a project for each residency period.
I am very grateful for the opportunity to be the Kerry County Council Visual Artist in Residence. This residency is supported by Kerry County Council and The Arts Council. The residency supports time to work creatively with communities and schools as well as supporting other artists through group and individual mentoring. It also creates valuable studio and project time for each residency period.
While I have been in residence before with the arts office, I like to play with the idea of being ‘in residence’, not only in service to the people of Kerry but also to the land and other creatures with whom we share this beautiful part of the earth. I want to expand the idea of being in residence in ‘the Kingdom’ incorporating principles of hospitality and welcome. I enjoy hosting events and artist mentoring at our farm and creative hub called The Barna Way in Ballybunion. This also provides the opportunity for people to walk the land and enjoy the meadows and trees alongside creative activities.
I felt this natured based approach is particularly useful for the group and individual mentoring sessions. As artists we work in a highly precarious and uncertain sector which can be very stressful. Artist often talk about their high stress levels and how they are struggling to make art and feed themselves and their families. Even when they do make art, they find it hard to get exhibition opportunities and/or sell the work. This makes it challenging to take on the next creative project. While this is not new scenario, it does seem to be exacerbated by the cost of living and rent increases of recent years. I have spent quite a bit of time supporting artists to create their career and life vision boards, clarifying their purpose and creative goals so they could prioritise what is most important to them.
Artists, teachers and communities are also concerned for future generations in terms of climate change and biodiversity loss. In a world of increasingly extreme weather events, people are experiencing high levels of eco anxiety and often have do not have the language to express the solistalgia (distress at the environmental degradation) they are feeling. In Kerry we continue to be badly affected by flooding, storms and erosion. I have been trying to offer art as a way of processing these challenges, asking people to reflect on the question: ‘What on eARTh can ART do? How can art and creative expression help to respond to the existential threats of our time? How do we connect with nature?
One of my favourite events last year was a workshop we held at Ballybunion Library called Drawing with Nature as part of Cruinniu na nog. I made live willow arches for the children to come through into the space and we had lots of eco and nature materials to draw with. The energy in the room was fantastic with both children and parents drawing with willow charcoal and colouring with natural dyes from flowers. The library had a great display of nature based books for the children to reference or borrow. It was beautiful to see how the children instinctively started playing with the willow, even making crowns and fairy wreaths to take away.
It is wonderful to work in schools and see all the creative work being done by teachers with classrooms bursting with art and ideas. I show them my drawings and films and we chat about the role that art can play in life. I really enjoy working with young people to draw the future and imagine how they would like things to be when they are adults. Students at Scoil Iosagain, Ballybunion did a huge drawing which was showcased at the North Kerry Sustainability Day at the Tintean Theatre. It was also great to work the students at Scoil Inbhear Sceine in Kenmare on their project called ‘Plant to Plate’ which just won a Young Environmentalist Award 2025. These projects all tie in with larger Green Schools Initiative and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Work with communities and groups all fed into my recent exhibition called The Square Tomato, which ran from from the 1st February- 22nd March at Siamsa Tire, Tralee. 2025. This also featured new works created with Creative Climate Action Projects (Brilliant Ballybunion & A Creative Imagining with Dingle Farmers).
The exhibition asked many questions. How we can feed ourselves, protect nature and be creative all at the same time? How do we want the future to be? It was also inspired by the work of Indian writer and activist Dr Vandana Shiva. During the residency I spent a month on her farm called Navdanya, drawing and making a short film called The Radical Art Of Living.
The response to the exhibition shows the interest there is in the bigger issues of biodiversity loss, food systems and climate change. According to the gallery counting system, over 16,000 visited the exhibition over just a few weeks. We held a large number of events and workshops with artists, schools and community groups over the course of the seven weeks.
Gemma Tipton (Art writer and Irish Times journalist) wrote a spcecially commissioned essay for the exhibition. The following is an extract from her writing:
“A square tomato, a test tube lunch, breathing apparatus for fish: Lisa Fingleton is the type of artist – she is also a grower, farmer and writer – who wears her rich and wide-ranging knowledge lightly. To this lightness of touch, she adds an extraordinary depth of purpose, encouraging us to consider the often appalling absurdities that have crept into our conception of what is natural and normal.
The challenges we face are interconnected, but just as pollutions and poisons flow into the threaded networks of roots and the trickling tributaries of the watertable, this exhibition opens up another set of networks. Here we discover an extraordinary seed bank in India, an Irish coastal community coming together to grow, and an antidote to the narrative that suggests that it is all too late.
If you would like to book a workshop or mentoring please contact arts@kerrycoco.ie
Kerry County Council Visual Artist in Residence is supported by Kerry County Council and The Arts Council.
