My Country Living: 'I'll carry on making my work about agriculture'

Growing up on my parents’ dairy farm in Gorey, Co Wexford, has always had an influence on me.

Even though I went on to study art, I brought the farm into everything I did. I still live with my parents Geraldine and Miley and my younger brother Barry, so whenever I can, I’ll go out and help on the farm.

I love working with the younger animals, especially the calves. We were always surrounded by animals and I would be much more into them than the machinery.

I have lots of cats that go everywhere with me, so even when I’m out with the cows, they will all come too. We have 10 cats!

I went to school in Gorey and after that, I did a PLC course in Gorey School of Art to make a portfolio to apply for college. My portfolio was all about ‘The Home’ and I used the farm as my inspiration.

I used to go and find objects around the farm that my father might have thrown out and those materials were brought into the artwork. The objects were pretty random. For example, pieces of metal or the net wrap used for bales – I got quite interested in that. Later, I moved on to immersing pieces of rusty metal into concrete. We have this old white-washed house and that was my main inspiration for the whole piece.

College

I was accepted into the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin. I was able to skip first year because of the PLC, so I went straight into second year. While I was there, I studied fine art sculpture and expanded practice.

My focus was on sculpture and I was commuting from home, so I had to bring all the materials on the bus with me.

At one point, I was making cheese and I had to bring that on the bus, which was terribly smelly.

I was using moulds, so instead of using plaster or plastic, I was using the milk from home.

I started making butter first, and later moved on to making cheese. Because I was doing contemporary art, it’s not the same as making stone sculptures or using regular materials.

Realistic art could be a picture of a cow or something, but contemporary art is more about resembling the cow, you just mightn’t know that it’s about a cow straight away.

Making the cheese was easy enough. I watched tutorials and I didn’t need any special implements.

We were doing an exhibition in Eblana House in my second year and it was during the time of the fodder crisis, so I used that as my inspiration.

I made a bale from net wrap and inside the bale, there was the sound of a cow roaring, which represented the cow’s hunger.

People liked it because you could touch it and there was quite an intense smell from it too – all my work has a smell to it.

I like to incorporate smell into my work because it makes it more interactive, rather than just visual. You can touch and smell it and sometimes you can even get into it.

Women in Agriculture

For third year, I made a shed. At this point, I had moved on and started looking at women in agriculture. The piece I made for the degree was to represent the gender imbalance (in agriculture), so I made a shed.

Inside, there was a video of me interacting with the farm. Showing how I’m quite small and that I sometimes struggle to do some of the work. I was using my body as a tool to create awareness with the project.

As it was a comment on my height, I made the door just 5ft, so I could walk in quite comfortably, whereas the men in my family would have to bend over and be put in the uncomfortable position.

Inside there was a truck with hay and nuts, with straw on the ground. People would enter and put on earphones while watching the video and listen to my brother reading out statistics from my thesis.

This theme was inspired by a book I was reading about women in agriculture before my final year and one of the sentences was, “She’s not cut out for it”. It was saying that women shouldn’t inherit the farm.

I then started to do more reading on the topic and discovered that people still think this way.

When I talked to people, they were saying that women don’t want to work on a farm, especially those in the city. They didn’t know that there were many women farmers around and that’s why I wanted to use my platform to create awareness.

I graduated in 2019 and now I’m doing a two-year master’s in education, with the aim of becoming an art teacher, but I’ll also carry on making my work about agriculture and the farm. I use Instagram now to highlight women in agriculture.

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‘The Unconventional Shed’ was built on @creagh_farm then dismantled and transported to @ncad_dublin for NCAD Degree Show 2019 #NCAD2019 . . . “Kenny’s work investigates the patriarchal authority and marginalisation of women in a male-dominated, agricultural environment. Only 12 percent of farmers in Ireland are female. The Unconventional Shed is a video installation. The shed reflects Kenny’s height. Inside the shed contains a television mounted to the wall over a trough of hay. She uses the colour pink as a way of dismantling stereotypes. The shed was built on her family farm in Wexford” . #ncad #ncad2019 #ncaddegreeshow #ncadgradshow #ncadgradshow2019 #degree #degreeshow #artstudent #sculpture #visualartist #farmireland #contemporaryart #video #videoinstallationart #womenempowerment #womenintheword #female #femaleempowerment #gender #genderequality #equality #stereotypes #feminist #feministart #femalefarmers #womeninag #irishfarms #farmsheds #farm365

A post shared by Katie. M. Kenny (@katie_kenny17) on Jul 12, 2019 at 11:15am PDT

I know that we are evolving and there are more women doing it now (farming), but the numbers are still very low. Although I’m going into teaching, I still want to be connected to the farm and hopefully I’ll have my own animals at some point.

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