Experience model village life at A Fair Land

I’m sitting with a collection of strangers, old friends and new acquaintances at a long table in the middle of a familiar courtyard in Dublin 8, the cobblestoned quadrant of Kilmainham Hospital, home to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). I’m sharing a lunch where each of the three courses features courgettes, served with a side emphasis on communality.

We’re challenged with the task of serving each other. We dish out tomato soup and delicious courgette-laced meatballs, from huge ceramic bowls, slurping from handmade ceramic spoons.

Our main course features a courgette baba ghanoush served with fragrant rice, ladelled from another over-sized ceramic serving bowl. The exceptional dessert is buttery shortbread, made from courgette flour, served with a remarkable courgette curd, laced with lemon.

From August 12th-28th of August, a temporary model village sprouted in the middle of this great courtyard, as a symbolic examination of the function of art, and this lunch is part of the installation. The project, A Fair Land, was a collaboration between IMMA and Grizedale Arts, an arts organisation based in the Lake District in the UK. They specialise in publicly and socially engaged art, and a recurring theme for them is the role of the artist in society, and what inherent value artists may have to contribute.

They’re inspired by the work of John Ruskin, the Victorian era art critic, social thinker and philanthropist, whose ideas around sustainability, environmentalism and craft have resurfaced today as highly influential.

Irish artist and cook Brenda Kearney was part of the core project team. She first came across Grizedale about five years ago, while working as a baker and fishmonger in London. She moved back to Ireland and was responsible for the cakes and sweet treats of The Fumbally in Dublin 8 for a spell. When she finished up in The Fumbally in 2015, she applied for a residency with Grizedale.

“It’s not a traditional residency format,” Kearney says of the process. “Everyone who applies does a free five day internship, and if that goes well, you can be taken on in a paid role.”

Kearney was one of the core team of artists who made up the Grizedale Arts and IMMA collaboration team, who came up with the project, A Fair Land. Adam Sutherland, the Director of Grizedale, was part of the core team which also included artists Niamh Riordan, Francesca Ulivi, Motoko Fujita and Emily Cropton. They’ve been based in IMMA since February of 2016, teasing out how they would make their idea of a model village that highlighted ideas around art in the everyday and the importance of achievable functionality a reality.

Courgette-based economy In the development phase, they hit upon the idea of the courgette-based economy. They wanted to explore the idea of taking a simple and basic resource, and building a way of living around it.

“We needed something that would be bountiful within a restricted timeframe, but also versatile. The courgette is a very global ingredient – most countries have some kind of squash – and interestingly, in flower language, courgette represents criticism,” says Kearney.

The team’s model village was made of three key areas – The Village Hall, The Barn and The Glut Field. If you know someone with even the smallest of growing plots, chances are they’ve tried to offload some courgettes on you recently. They are hardy little guys who grow happily and abundantly, presumably the inspiration behind the name The Glut Field. This growing patch wasn’t like any other growing system I’d ever encountered.

Artist Karen Guthrie was brought in by Grizedale and IMMA to construct the straw-bale growing plot. Straw-bales are watered, which over time sparks a fermentation process. This leads to a natural heating of the straw, which in turn creates a compost-like environment in the middle of the straw bale, creating a perfect condition for growing once the temperature has peaked and has cooled down again.

The courgette straw-bales were first planted in Wicklow and then transferred to the bales after they had been fermented at IMMA. Beautiful courgette plants sprouted from the straw bales, their yellow flowers in full bloom.

The Barn of the model village was also constructed from straw bales, and was a space for harvesting and experimenting with courgettes. Classes and demos happened here throughout the three week period, including talks from people like Tony Louth, a Dublin- based composter involved in community project Our Farm (ourfarm.ie) and Chicago- based Sweet Water Foundation, who aim to turn waste into a community resource (sweetwaterfoundation.org).

Also a major part of the project was The School for Revolutionary Girls, an opportunity for 20 teenage women to discover their own unique public voice.

The bustling hub of the model village was The Village Hall, an indoor-outdoor temporary structure that housed a long, communal dining table that hosted courgette-based lunches, flanked on four corners by workshop areas.

The workshops included ceramics, printing, a courgette pickling station and a slipper-making station. Items could be either made, or bought through ceramic tokens, A Fair Land’s currency. These workshops were designed to drive home the point that the material are very cheap, widely available and that the most important resource was time.

“There can a big disconnect in how we approach day-to-day living and creating, in that objects and processes are held as mysterious, hierarchical or costly things,” says Kearney. “The idea with A Fair Land is that everything here is achievable, you just need to invest time.”

Though the model village has been dismantled and the courtyard returned to its straw-free state, the ideas of the project live on through courgette recipes on the IMMA website. Find out about the project, and find some inspiration for your own glut of courgettes, online at bit.ly/AFairLandIT. Aoife McElwain