Triennial hosting screening of film by Irish artist that highlights farming pressures

Photo of Deirdre O’Mahony by Margaret O’Brien Moran

MEDINA – The feature event of the Medina Triennial this Saturday will be a talk and screening with renowned Irish artist Deirdre O’Mahony.

At 4 p.m. Saturday at the Medina Hub headquarters on North Main Street, a special screening of “The Quickening” will be followed by a conversation with O’Mahoney, who is not only an Irish artist, but a farmer.

This event will offer residents, particularly farmers, and others involved in agriculture and food production, an opportunity to discuss the pressures facing farming communities.

O’Mahoney’s visit to the United States is supported by Culture Ireland (the Irish government). This is significant, according to Medina Triennial co-curator Kari Conte, because she is one of Ireland’s leading artists and this is her first public lecture and screening ever in the United States.

Although “The Quickening” is rooted in rural Ireland, the issues it raises are immediately relevant to Medina and Orleans County, Conte said.

Medina is surrounded by some of New York state’s most productive farmland. Local farmers face many of the same pressures explored in the film – volatile markers, rising production costs, changing regulations, extreme weather, soil health, food security and expectations that farmers alone should address broader environmental problems.

As both an artist and a farmer, O’Mahoney’s perspective is grounded in direct experience of rural life, and in more than three decades of working with farmers, food producers, scientists, policymakers and rural communities.

A central question of the program is “What are farmers being asked to sustain, and how can responsibility for the future of food and land be shared across society?”

The discussion may be especially meaningful for local farmers because it acknowledges that agricultural knowledge is not only scientific or institutional. It is also built through generations of observation, labor, adaption and lived experience.

“The Quickening” is a 35-minute film completed in 2024. It is currently on view at Mustang City (the former Medina High School).

This project grew from two communal meals, called “Sustainment Experiments,” which O’Mahoney organized in Ireland in 2022 and 2023, in which farmers, food producers, scientists, food-business owners, politicians and policymakers gathered around the table to speak openly about farming and food production.

Their conversations became the basis for the film’s libretto, developed by O’Mahoney with writer Joanna Walsh.  The resulting work brings together documentary imagery, spoken and sung language, original music, animal sounds and the movements of insects and organisms within the soil.  The work also emphasizes the often-invisible organisms that make agriculture possible, including bacteria, fungi, earthworms, insets and dung beetles.

Rather than treating farmers as either the cause of environmental problems or the sole agents responsible for solving them, O’Mahoney’s “The Quickening” asks how the responsibility for sustaining soil, food systems and rural life can be shared by everyone who depends upon them.