Art Leads

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Artists Leaders is a podcast which ditches the algorithmic pressures to be super snappy in favour of a relaxed and conversational pace. This episode was recorded in Anna Macleods studio in Sheehan’s House Artists Studios a busy main street which is part of The Leitrim Sculpture Centre Workshop which is on New Line Road in Manorhamilton
A hawthorn tree near Manorhamilton that split in half years ago, by lightning, perhaps, has been happily residing in Macleod's studio for many years and , "moving and changing in its own time." In this new episode of Artists As Cultural Leaders, the Scottish-Irish artist speaks  about the folk practices, farming heritage, and material intelligence that drive her sculpture, textile, and performance work.
The conversation traces a practice that has spent well over two decades researching water, its scarcity, its mismanagement, and industrial and colonial infrastructures from the Gobi Desert to the Colorado River. More recently her attention has been focused on a single forty-acre farm in Co. Leitrim, where she has been working in collaboration with writer Gerry Bohan, an eighth-generation farmer and storyteller whose family has worked the same reclaimed bogland. Listeners hear her account of the folklore embedded in ordinary farm labour: the belief, still quietly practised in pockets of rural Ireland, that a cow's afterbirth should be carried to the hawthorn tree each spring as an offering, a ritual which Macleod links to hawthorns' long-held status as portals to the otherworld, and to an old, uneasy suspicion that the tree should never be cut without leaving something for the fairies in return. 
She talks through her own materials in the same register: cow-tail hair spun into rope, in direct lineage with hay rope and horsehair rope traditions she has also documented in the Gobi Desert and in the crofting communities of the Outer Hebrides, where her family is from; bog oak and bog pine, whose tannins stain the wood into deep browns and reds; and beeswax-lined basketry, once used to carry water across a landscape with no other means of doing so.
The episode also covers Macleod's residency at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, where she cast seven species of caddisfly larval cases in recycled aluminium. Caddisfly make tiny underwater architectures built from sand, stone, and silk-glue, and prized by ecologists as bellwethers of river health. This project marked the ecological recovery of the Water of Leith. She describes pairing the casts with a hand-embroidered healing banner, its threads dyed from twelve riverside plants historically used as medicinal herbs, carried in procession along the river in a nod to the radical nineteenth-century Fife embroidery schools that gave tenant-farming women economic independence through needlework.
Throughout, the podcast, Macleod is candid about the pull between research and intuition, about her scepticism that humans are as adaptable as we like to believe, as she puts it, we are pressed to look to the deep past for mechanisms or ways of being that might help navigate our future selves.

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This episode was recorded at The Black Box Theatre and Studios in Galway. Home to Artspace and The Galway Arts Festival.
In this conversation, Sarah and Fionna Murray unfold her practice back through five decades from post-punk Manchester to Chelsea and Belfast. They speak about early chapters of Murray's biography, which is her largely undocumented work in music promotion. Murray co-ran an independent club that gave Echo & the Bunnymen an early Manchester gig before losing the venue due to licensing laws. Returning to London, Murray co-founded a club in a King's Cross pub that hosted The Pogues' first performances. However, ultimately this work redirected her toward painting via evening classes at St Martin's.
Fionna’s Artspace Studio is overlooking the Corrib, its window framing the university's spire and the slow churn of river traffic. Fionna Murray is quietly assembling one of the more psychologically dense bodies of work to emerge in Irish painting. Her practice is built on distillation and stillness and its close confessional scale.
Murray's current painting cycle has its origins in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up, a work she first encountered on television in 1980s London. The film's central setting, a park whose manicured wildness stands in for a kind of constructed rurality within the city.  This, for Murray, became a proxy for something more autobiographical: the negotiated inheritance of being raised in London by parents from Donegal and Mayo. The urban furniture of municipal parks; railings, oval beds, and park flowers became motifs recurring across the new paintings. They are drawn as much from Antonioni's mise-en-scène as from the artist's own material archaeology.  Murray uses twisted paper handles salvaged from shopping bags, cellophane flower wrappers, and tissue paper to assemble her own park-like installations first shown at Galway's 126 Gallery and later at Limerick City Gallery, in an exhibition curated by Sarah Searson. Curiously, the Limerick gallery itself is set within a Victorian public park whose iron railings supplied an uncanny echo of her imagery.
Following her degree at Chelsea College of Art in London, Murray undertook an MFA in Belfast, a change from the more austere, abstraction ethos of her London training, a move which re-opened the door to figuration in her practice. Fellow students and friends from that Belfast cohort include the painter Brian Fay and the late Des Ward, who introduced Murray to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, which remains a touchstone. A subsequent group exhibition at Dublin's Rubicon Gallery led Murray toward Galway, where she built a long teaching career at ATU, alongside a studio practice sustained through Artspace Studios.
Literary and art-historical reference points anchor the new paintings' sense of theatrical stillness. For example, Ludwig Bemelmans's Madeleine books, with their flourished cursive script, neatly lined characters and loose, whimsical ink work and strict discipline of structure, point to the spirit of curiosity in Murray's work.  Maeve Brennan's novella The Visitor lent one painting its title, The Neat Black Flowerbeds; and a 1547–1619 miniature by Nicholas Hilliard, Young Man Among Roses, a striking romantic young swain, a bramble-bound, oval-framed figure resonates with Murray's own compositional logic of enclosure and wildness. Hiroshi Sugito is also cited as a touchstone for the pared-back, theatrical spareness of Murray's sensibility. She cites Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ in London's National Gallery as a formative work of reference.
 Since retiring from full-time teaching in 2024, Murray has entered what she describes as a newly unbroken period of studio focus, one in which the fractured motifs of childhood, migration, and constructed landscape are being worked, patiently, into paint.
Fionna Murray's Portrait is courtesy of Joanne O’Brien
Links: 
Fionna Murray's Website
Fionna Murray Instagram 
Artspace Studios 
126 Gallery
Limerick City Gallery of Art

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Episode 1, Series II 

“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible."                                                                                                                          bell hooks 

Artist Sarah O' Brien's rural studio is in Kinsale, Co Cork, nor far from where she lives and works. The studio is as much a part of her art as the work itself. Located in an idyllic setting, her workspace offers an elemental connection to the creative process. O'Brien describes it as a sanctuary from a busy life at her families OHK Cafe Kinsale. 
Motherhood  has also served as a significant turning point, reshaping her identity and connecting her more deeply with her practice. She openly discusses the transformation in her approach, embracing the vulnerability of bringing works from the secluded studio to public view.
To learn more about Sarah O'Brien and her work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram. Listen to discover and engage with the dynamism of her creations, a testament to the indefinable and infinite possibilities inherent in the artistic journey.
Sarah O'Brien is interviewed by Sarah Searson, Curator. The podcast was recorded in Monkstown Co Dublin and was produced recorded and edited by Sarah Searson. 

Links: 
Series Webpage 
Artists as Cultural Leaders Instagram 
Sarah O'Briens Website
Sarah O'Briens Instagram

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Dr Cathy Fitzgerald is an ecological artist, creative entrepreneurial educator, and researcher with  a long interest in the potential of ecoliterate creative people in catalysing community and conversations for a more equitable, sustainable, and peaceful world. She co-developed Haumea Ecoversity, an independent online platform that has supported upskilling over 300+ mid-career creative and cultural professionals in ecoliteracy and values-based learning. Cathy is centred on the potential of the creative sectors role in promoting a significant cultural shift, to inspire communities to think and act for a better world. She is interested in sustainable livelihoods that align with ecosocial values and shares knowledge with those who  learn with her. To explore Cathy's work, visit hollywoodforest.com and HaumeaEcoversity.ie

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Kate Strain is a curator of visual arts and founder of Kunstverein Aughrim, a curatorial production office established in 2022. Kunstverein Aughrim is located on the ground floor of a town house in Aughrim, County Wicklow, Ireland, and is part of a franchise established by Kunstverein Amsterdam, with sisters in Milan, New York, and Toronto. Kunstverein Aughrim collaborates closely with artists and communities to support the production of new artwork, bringing audiences as close to the creative process as possible. Kunstverein Aughrim is supported by the Arts Council and Wicklow County Council. www.kunstverein.ie

Artists as Cultural Leaders is supported by Culture Ireland and developed by Roscommon Arts Service it takes place in February 2024. Artists as Cultural Leaders is a series of presentations, and discussions by contemporary practitioners who share visual arts skills & strategies in the evolving landscape of visual and artistic leadership.