Farm Walks

The Farm Walks project was co-created by Leitrim County Council Arts Office and The Dock Arts Centre with The Leitrim Sustainable Agriculture Group and the Ulster Wildlife Farmers’ Group in Fermanagh and funded through the Creative Ireland Shared Island Programme. Through the project, the partners aim to build cross-border cooperation, to explore the common ground between farmers and artists, and to highlight shared farming and environmental interests.

Background

In 2024 the programme consisted of six walks (three in Leitrim and three in Fermanagh) which featured a tour of each farm and a talk by an invited artist whose work resonates with that farm, its creative potential, heritage or other special characteristics. While this demonstrated the crossover and shared interests of artists and farmers in the two counties, this next phase of the project in 2025, which is split into two parts, will provide the opportunity for artists and farmers to work together for longer periods on projects of shared interest. Both artists and farmers are paid for their time, and further funding will be sought to bring any ideas arising from those partnerships to fruition.

The project seeks to develop a platform for creative collaboration between artists and farmers, providing alternatives to the current view, and making connections and linkages where they may not have existed previously. The project takes from international models which have shown that there is a real demand not only from farmers looking to explore the capacity of creativity to influence what they do, but also by artists wanting to interact with farmers and to and have positive impact and explore their practice in a farm environment.

Farm Walks 2026

Following action-research residencies, artists and farmers have prepared joint proposals to work over an extended period to develop projects of shared interest.

Mohill farmer Gerry Bohan and artist Steph Saidha share a fascination for speculation, storytelling, and the imaginative potential of the rural landscape. Through humour and curiosity, they have brought together folklore, ecology, and fiction to create new narratives that invite reflection on our relationship with land, animals, traditions,

Ecologist and farmer Dolores Byrne and artist Grace Weir reimagine the Quadrat as a two cubic metre of farmland, a small volume alive with interconnections. The project interweaves Weir’s explorations of the slippages between conceptual thought and lived experience, tracing how space and time unfold across material and immaterial realms with Byrne’s examination of living (flora, fauna) and non-living (light, minerals, topography) elements. Their proposed sculptural book, both form and record, becomes an expansive conversation between observation and recollection, tracing relations both immediate and far-reaching to explore how every element from mineral to flower reveals a complex interplay of deep time and transience. A small plot unfolds deeper scales of time and relation, where human interventions ripple across vast temporal and ecological dimensions.

Artist Helen Sharp and farmer Barry Connolly are producing a short documentary film centred on five conversations about land and farming. Filmed on Barry's working farm in Fermanagh and the surrounding region, the project brings together personal experience with wider cultural, ecological and social perspectives on land use and rural life. Shot over the winter of 2025–2026, the film captures the farm’s landscapes and seasonal rhythms while exploring themes of farming, belonging, community and the future of land stewardship. The project aims to create space for thoughtful dialogue about land, farming and change, grounded in the lived realities of rural communities.

Artist Anna McGurn and Farmers Jane and Roger Corrigan share a passion and concern for the cultural history of rural areas, which they view as equally endangered and precarious as farm incomes or biodiversity. The starting point for their project centred on collecting stories and histories particular to their farm that might well be lost to time. In a broader sense, their work seeks to underpin the value of these histories and their relevance to community and contemporary land use.

Sheep farmer Valerie Irwin and artist Christine Mackey have been working together over time — in fields, in studios, in conversation — tracing wool from fleece to fibre to form. Their collaboration is rooted in embodied knowledge: the handling, reading, and understanding of material through touch, repetition, and care.  In Ireland today, wool is often treated as waste, a byproduct with little commercial value. This project pushes back against that. Drawing on the knowledge of an active working group of crafters and artists, and collecting wool from a range of breeds across the island, Irwin and Mackey recover the tradition of lomra — the handmade wool rug — asking what wool can still do and what meanings it continues to hold — structurally, ecologically, culturally.

The work here is not fixed. It is processual, shaped by ongoing exchange between land, material, and maker. Wool, they propose, is not an ending. It is a place to begin. The Farm Walks project (est. 2023) was co-created by Leitrim County Council Arts Office and The Dock, in partnership with The Leitrim Sustainable Agriculture Group and the Ulster Wildlife Farmers’ Group in Fermanagh, funded through the Creative Ireland Shared Island Programme. Through the project, the partners aim to build cross-border cooperation, to explore the common ground between artists and farmers, and to highlight shared farming and environmental interests.