The Quickening by Deirdre O’Mahony

We are delighted to be hosting a screening and conversation of “The Quickening” in partnership with Visual Carlow, a powerful new artwork by ground-breaking artist Deirdre O’Mahony in Rathanna Community Hall, County Carlow on Thursday, 18th April at 7pm to 8.30pm.

Bringing together urgent conversations, original music and moving images, The Quickening responds to issues facing farming, food production and consumption, in the face of present ecological and climate crisis.

A nationwide project that culminated in over three years of research, The Quickening opened at The Douglas Hyde on 29th March 2024 and will be touring the South East of Ireland as part of the Walls and Halls Tour.

This is a free event. Please book to ensure a seat. 

More about The Quickening

Artist Deirdre O’Mahony’s The Quickening is a sound and moving image work, commissioned by The Douglas Hyde, that has emerged from a series of gatherings to talk about the issues faced in food production and farming today. O’Mahony’s Sustainment Experiments feasts held in Kilkenny and Dublin generated open and frank discussions between farmers, scientists and politicians which, transcribed, have become a libretto for this impactful new work. Developed by O’Mahony and writer Joanna Walsh, the libretto is voiced by singers and musicians, Branwen Kavanagh, Michelle Doyle, Siobhán Kavanagh, Ultan O’ Brien and Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, each with a distinctive pitch, style, and pace. This aural feast is accompanied by moving imagery captured across rural Ireland, showing varied viewpoints of the land and its many inhabitants affected by the unseasonal droughts, floods, and erosion, brought on by accelerating climate change. As O’Mahony states, “The Quickening represents a polyvocal response to the most urgent questions affecting land and its inhabitants, giving voice to the invisible protagonists that shape our earth’s future and an idea of being-in-common that encompasses all earthly inhabitants.”

More about Deirdre O’Mahony

Deirdre O’Mahony has an impressive 30-year track record in making work across sculpture, painting, installation, and participatory projects. At the centre of this work is her interest in the politics of landscape, rural/urban relationships, rural sustainability, and food security. She has investigated the political ecology of rural places through public engagement, exhibitions, critical writing, and cultural production. From setting up community spaces amongst a charged local conflict to her large-scale paintings produced by tracing the shadows of boulders on Mullaghmore Mountain in the Burren National Park, she deftly considers the role of art in bringing together diverse communities, forming alternate forms of knowledge, and embraces art as a critical space to help us see things differently.