SEED MATTER, Part II 'Living Fields'

The Leitrim Sculpture Centre is delighted to present SEED MATTER Part II ‘Living Fields’, a multi-media exhibition by Christine Mackey. This exhibition, organised to coincide with the Agricultural show in Manorhamilton at the end of July, addresses Mackey’s on-going social investigation of land use, plant culture and community gardening in an attempt to envision local ecological processes relative to global contexts. Mackey also reflects on the wider geo-political effects of international patency laws such as ‘Order 81’ (see, Iraq, 2004), and similar European directives (ie. the DUS Law), which discourage farmers from saving and re-using their indigenous seeds.

For SEED MATTER Part II ‘Living Fields’ Mackey unearths rare archival material in relation to Dr. Keith Lamb’s record of apple species once found growing in a vast network of orchards in Ireland. Mackey re-activates and prints a number of images on cork paper from Lamb’s archive, which are memoralized through the medium of sound. Running parallel is a video work titled Nick’s Press, which documents the ‘lost’ craft of pressing apples during ‘apple day’ an annual event, held by Manorhamilton Transition town group.

Since 2010, Mackey has been growing a variety of plants sourced from individuals and seed saving organizations in Ireland and abroad. Each year she select’s a number of plants as they come into flower, which are dried and pressed - a process not normally developed for vegetable matter. This on-going work Seed Boards contain an amalgamation of dried matter, seed bags, drawings, seed saving techniques and photo-documentation, with each board uncovering a specific issue around the cultural, scientific and economic value of seeds. Living Fields is a live installation of various heritage plants from Ireland and abroad, which are in the process of going to and/or, in seed.

Mackey has playfully applied a range of taxonomic, documentary and museum display methods, enacted with live material, in an attempt to uncover the geo-political control of biological organisms, food sovereignty, land use and social justice. This juxtaposition of live material constructs an open discursive framework to tease out a range of current issues in relation to ‘seeds’ and the control of food. In Re-visiting the Archive, Mackey return to a former site in Sligo, where she had mapped an orchard to discover that the original site had been destroyed and in its place a storage depot had been constructed. In response to this erasure, Mackey decided to commemorate the orchard by planting an apple tree [Brown Crofton] at the original site. This unofficial intervention is documented in the video work P.I.P.

SEED MATTER Part II ‘Living Fields’ is housed under the collective title: ‘The Politics of Seeds’, which has evolved into various productions: solo exhibition at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny; SEED MATTER and ‘other’ stories (2011); a site-visit to the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway (2010); a publication ‘TRADE OFF Planters’ (2009-2010) - a seed exchange event through TRADE (2009); and a recent collection of drawings commissioned for publication ‘Line Exploring Space’ for the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2012).