Deirdre O’Mahony
2022 - 2023
Deirdre O’Mahony is a visual artist whose practice has focused on the complicated relationship between land, landscape, and ecological sustainability. Public artworks, X-PO (2007/8) and SPUD (2009–2019) reflected on the broader tensions between knowledge erasure and agricultural modernisation. Sustainment Experiments (2020–) developed this thinking further through plantings, events and feasts designed to bring about the kind of cultural and behavioural shifts needed given climate change and biodiversity collapse. This research will culminate in a new sound and image artwork The Quickening, which will be completed in 2024.
In 2022/3 she hosted two feasts, Eat Food Policy, supported by Kunstverein Aughrim and the Irish Museum of Modern Art at City Assembly House Dublin and Parmentier feast and exhibition at Butler Gallery, Kilkenny as part of Sustainment Experiments. Other exhibitions and projects in 2022 include Model Plot for Field Exchange Creative Ireland Climate Call, Feeder RHA Gallery, Dublin, Sustainment Experiments: The PLOT at VISUAL Carlow.
Recent awards include Visual Arts Bursary (2022) and Arts Council Project Development Award (2022), Artlinks Bursary (2021) and Fire Station Artist Studios Residency (2022-3) and Sculpture Award (2021). Academic qualifications include a BA (Fine Art) St Martins School of Art, London (1979), MRes. Crawford College Cork, CIT, (2005) and PhD from the University of Brighton (2012).