Expanding your field of vision

A shop bought BLT typically wouldn’t cost the average person a second thought. It’s simply a convenience. Eat it, dump the packaging in the bin, forget about it.

Not so for Lisa Fingleton. For her the BLT opened up a whole world of possibilities.

“It’s called the Sandwich Project,” begins Laura O’Connor who has curated the group exhibition in Townhall Arts Centre, entitled ‘Scenic Roots’.

“She was installing a show and bought a BLT and read the packaging and realised where everything had come from and then did this drawing of where all the ingredients come from.”

That hand drawing on enormous sheets of vinyl allows Lisa to document every single ingredient in the sandwich, to a minuscule degree. So the pigs, tomato vines and lettuces are depicted as you would expect, but so too are all those yummy ingredients of which the average consumer has no idea - like guar gum, dextrose, mono- and diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids. Lisa’s intense gaze at the subject opens up a new perspective on the packaged sandwich, and indeed all such convenience food.

“Her schtick is all about sustainable farming, but she’s also an incredible illustrator,” Laura observes.

“She works with farmers finding ways to farm sustainably, but also sustaining farmers - how people can buy local, we don’t have to buy stuff that’s been imported.”

Such different perspectives of farming and rural concerns are what loosely binds the various strands of the Scenic Roots exhibition together.

“There are a lot of artists making work about farming, rural life or agriculture - looking at it from a different perspective. Not necessarily looking at it as a landscape painting of romantic Ireland,” says Laura.

Lisa Fingleton’s work occupies the gallery space at the Townhall Arts Centre while large sculptural pieces lurk in the dark theatre space. Given the theatre closes down for stage productions in August, this month is the chance for the visual arts panel to have a space befitting their ambitions. A panel member, Laura had suggested this exhibition having noticed how similar themes were cropping up in the work of Irish artists she admired, many of who had exhibited together before.

Possibly the artworks most detached from the landscapes romantising Ireland are those by Kian Benson Bailes from Sligo.

“He makes work about being a queer person living in a rural area. He is obviously very close to his mother an grandmother and talks about dressing up in their shawls and clothes. So the sculptures we have of his are the ‘Cailleach Boy’, a play on the old hag, the cailleach woman, but these are insect creatures and have six legs and are kind of futuristic.”

They are also absolutely enormous and intriguing, occupying an uncomfortable space somewhere between comedic and frightening.

Laura Fitzgerald’s previous exhibition centred around a fued between her father and a neighbour over a piece of land. In her contribution to Scenic Roots she references the ubiquitous black silage bales with the declaration: ‘I AM MAD’.

“She incorporates the smaller nuanced aspects of every day rural life and mixes it with her own identity as a visual artist,” suggests Laura. “The bales in the show are speakers and they are talking about applying for Arts Council funding and what boxes to tick, and ‘Am I emerging or am I emerged?’ So there’s humour, and it’s finding your way around living on a farm but being a visual artist in a very contemporary art world.”

Laura notices that a bottle of Round-up weedkiller features in the illustrations in the gallery, but also crops up in one of the sculptures, suggesting the artworks are in conversation.

“Some of the sculptures [in the theatre] are a quite abstract, and a bit odd and obscure, but then I find the drawings really contextualise everything so when you come in here [the gallery], you get a very clear idea of what we’re talking about in the show.”

Scenic Roots continues to Sunday, September 15 at the Town Hall Arts Centre Cavan. It may give you a slightly different perspective on life in rural Ireland. At the very least, you will never look at a shop bought sandwich in the same way again.