FERTILE IMAGES OF FAMINE

ON the small video monitor there is a close up of a woman's breast, surrounded by water. From the nipple issues a fine but constant flow of white liquid, streaming in drowsy wisps into the clear water.

"It happened just like you'd imagine," says Alanna O'Kelly, multimedia artist and owner of the breast. "I was in the bath when I noticed it. I'd heard lots of other women say the same thing, that they'd notice little dribbles come, or it happens if you're thinking of the child, or it's near feeding time, or when the child wakes. I just felt it had to be included."

We are sitting in O'Kelly's house, easily recognisable as the artistic one of a terrace of north Dublin city houses. Inside her studio, there is a tangle of biscuit barrels, tuna sandwiches, children, video monitors, DAT (digital audio tape) machines, and lying across the floor, some long carpet like shapes wrapped in black plastic. "That's the material for the screen," says O'Kelly indicating the black packages. "I was talking to the people who went out last time and they said to be sure you took everything you need with you. So I'm even bringing my own toolbox."

Late last September, O'Kelly was in preparation for her departure to Silo Paulo, Brazil, where her work A Beathu, currently represents Ireland at that contemporary art biennial. Last time the first time Ireland was represented - three artists travelled to South America's most important art show: Philip Napier, Alice Maher and Ciaran Len non. This year the representation has been cut to one: Co Wexford born O'Kelly.

O'Kelly, born in 1955, studied art at NCAD before graduating in 1978. In the years after college, she travelled widely, in Finland, Lapland, the Baltic Republics and Eastern Europe, before undertaking post graduate studies at Slade School of Art in London. Her early work as a sculptor involved the use of biodegradable materials, such as flax and fern, to create temporary sculptural installations that straddled Land Art and more conventional gallery sculpture. But her time at Slade found her becoming more interested in the possibilities of photgraphy, sounds and texts. Her more recent work uses slides sound and video extensively.

In 1986, O'Kelly created Chant Down Greenham, a sound performance work juxtaposing keening with mechanical noises. The following year she was invited as the Irish representative to Germany's mammoth Documenta art show/festival. O'Kelly first began working specifically on the theme of the Great Hunger in a 1992 IMMA show entitled The Country Blooms - A Garden and a Grave, while her 1994 IMMA Glen Dimplex award winning show continued the process of linking landscape to the reading of history and to the interpretation of contemporary events.

ONE of the pieces O'Kelly created for that exhibition, The Sanctuary - Wastelands, involved a slide projection of some rugged landscape (a Famine burial site) projected through a gauze filter onto one wall of a darkened room. Onto this were projected smaller spectral images, which faded in and out during a 10 minute cycle, accompanied, once more, by a recording of a woman keening.

When the President, Mrs Robinson presented the Glen Dimplex award, she made reference to O'Kelly's ability to draw attention to famine as a contemporary issue, but also to an Irish "folk memory of famine". Speaking at the time, O'Kelly said: "When you read about the Famine, you're reading stuff that you've just read in the papers, stuff that you've just heard about Somalia, or about any famine stricken country." The intervening years have served only to strengthen this conviction.

"In a way I hate harping on the Famine, but when I started reading about it, it just seemed so monumental, so huge, a huge black area, such a big bloody deal, it swept through the country and it changed it forever, changed the way things were going. It has to be good for us to awaken to it."

As O Kelly's belief about the importance of the Famine has strengthened so has her sense that certain of her images remain articulate about it. The image of the artist's lactating breast, which she suggests explores ideas of abundance, depravation and famine (but also, it might seem, confronts and parodies a strain of machismo in performance art) features largely in the video O'Kelly brought for installation in Sao Paulo.

This is not the first time O'Kelly has used this image. Indeed her work is characterised by a relatively tight ecology of images, by her ability to find new homes and new contexts for all sorts of sound and visual components. Just as the image of the lactating breast turned up in her 1992 show at IMMA, another part of her Silo Paulo video installation will be familiar to those who crammed into the little, darkened crypt of St Mary's Abbey to see the artist perform Omos.

In that performance, O'Kelly created a macabre song and dance in which her bare feet, isolated by a spotlight, pounded on the cold stone floor while she chanted, using the vaulted structure's eerie acoustics to accentuate her violent keening. The version of the work which shows up in Sao Paulo, however, was re performed in a church in Hollywood, in Co Wicklow which had previously hosted Anuna, while a portable studio overseen by Pol Brennan (of the Clannad Brennans) listened in.

"The recording was an incredible experience. When I did the piece as a performance, it always lasted roughly the same amount of time, but during the recording it just sort of took off until it was double or treble the length. It was arbitrary how long it went on, says O'Kelly.

But while O'Kelly may have her prolix moments, when performing she likes "to keep things quite minimal. I love to peel things back until you have almost nothing left," says O'Kelly. "I mean when I did a piece for the Pompidou Centre a few years ago, I don't think I got the balance right. I mean Declan McGonagle went to see the show and missed the piece. Thinking of leaving a piece behind for two months, as I will with this one in Silo Paulo, is awesome. The work has to stand on its own in a different culture. It has been kind of hard work to get it right and I don't actually know if it is right . . . but now it feels right to me.

On her return from Sao Paulo, perhaps buoyed as much by the news of her recent accession to Aosdana as by events in South America, O'Kelly's doubts seem to have been put to rest. Indeed, she rings up to say just how sure she is now, how she found local children singing along to her taped shrieks, about how an Irishman teaching in a local school organised a show of his pupils' work inspired by O'Kelly's imagery.

"I suppose I'm relieved in a way. Sometimes when you put a piece somewhere abroad it can be a very empty feeling. People don't know the ins and outs of what you're talking about but I don't think I've ever had such good reaction to the work."