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| Notes From Sheepland |
Farmers don’t get a lot of visibility in film, at least not as people telling their own stories. That’s hard to do when farms themselves demand so much time and attention and force a strict schedule. Orla Barry, however, is a rare breed, a farmer who is also an artist, having developed an art career in brussels before moving back to Ireland to take over her father’s farm. Cara Holmes is a filmmaker, and when the two of them connected, a unique collaboration was born. Notes From Sheepland recently screened at Docs Ireland 2023, and I met up with the two women to discuss it, beginning by asking how they met.
“I think it was through Liz Burns, a mutual friend of ours,” says Cara. “Liz Burns is an arts manager – there are different arts officers around the country and and so we have mutual friends. I was really interested in doing a project on women and farming, maybe the history of women in farming and how they have contributed to farming in Ireland. Liz said ‘Oh, I’ve got this really interesting farmer for you to meet down in Wexford.’ I think it was six years ago, maybe, now. I was just on holiday and went over to Orla’s place in Seafield in Wexford. I was introduced to the sheep and had some lovely Wexford strawberries.
“Orla had been on my mind and I'd been to Orleans book launch in the Crawford gallery in Cork. And then I was thinking, ‘Okay, this could be a really good project for the Reel Art scheme which is part of the Arts Council of Ireland. A documentary kind of experimental film project. Id like the idea of Orla as a visual artist and a farmer. It seemed like an interesting chance to explore that.”
She’s made a number of shorts before. Did this film start out that way, or was it always going to be a feature?
“I was really wanting to move into features of some form, or definitely a longer form, anyway,” she says, and mentions that we reviewed one of her shorts, Welcome To A Bright White Limbo, here at Eye For Film – something I hadn’t been aware of. “So yeah, I was looking for projects, and very specifically longer form projects. I was interested in moving between different art forms and bringing it into the film world and seeing how it would all work out. Going from shorts to features, it's a big learning curve.”
We pause because a small dog has climbed up and attached herself to Orla, who describes her as “my new piece of velcro.” I ask if she works with the sheep and Orla explains that the sheep farming isn’t happening at the moment due to an injury, though she does still have some sheep and hopes to get back to it. I ask how she felt when she was initially approached about the possibility of being a documentary subject.
“Well, I mean, to be honest, I had met Cara before. I think if anyone ever approached me about filming me in any form, and I'll probably go ‘No, no, no!’” She covers her face with her hands. “Because we had met earlier and it was just an informal meeting, well, we kept in touch. Cara came to the book launch, which was really nice, and then we met up to talk about the Reel Art award, which is based on a documentary about an arts subject. I really liked that idea, and Cara approached me in a very collaborative way, not like ‘I just want to make a documentary about you,’ but ‘Can we work together?’ and ‘Can I use parts out of the book?’ You know, she’d seen some of the work and stuff like that, so all that was really appealing.
“I had seen her short about Oona Doherty, which I thought it was amazing. I thought the film Cara made was amazing and I also knew Luca, the cameraman, from working with him myself before, just taking photographs of performances and stuff. So it was very intimate kind of this. I was immediately comfortable with the people, when I'm actually quite a private person.”
I ask Cara about the distinctive structure of the film and the tone she sets with its opening scenes, which almost have the quality of folk horror. Both women are amused by that.
“I suppose the whole process was like, we were talking about how to bring artists art into the documentary form,” says Cara. “I'm really interested in that kind of idea of blurring the lines in every sense, and not being so rigid with forms. The scope of the funding allowed that. I think I was really, truthfully, trying to integrate the artwork, trying to find the balance of my taste as well, and how myself and Orla’s work kind of meet in the middle.
“I was basing the narrative on Orla’s book, but then also, from a filmmaking point of view, I was quite interested in that kind of opening scene of different blends, and just seeing how it would work. It seemed to kind of stick then. There was a few different openings; that was the one that we landed on in the end. The whole of it was trying to get the artist’s perspective, and that was my interest from the very start. How is farming being seen through Orla’s eyes? And that intersection of the art world and farming world.
“I definitely wanted to be playful with the form. Maybe if it was a different fund, I would have been way more structured, but being playful, pushing out the visuals and integrating Orla’s artwork, that was all on the table. I was having a bit of fun in the edit as well, because I work as an editor quite a lot but I don't get a chance to be so fluid or so playful a lot of the time.”
At one point in the film a choir appears and starts singing. Where did that come from?
“We were working on this for about 12 months. I had done a couple of months of research, and I was really interested in bringing music and song and the local community into the film as well. So it was actually just a Google search. The Wexford Male Voice Choir came up, and they were brilliant. It's really funny, even for something as simple as trying to get a choir, you have to get the rights for the choir and who did the arrangements, so there’s all these layers within it. But they were so up for it. Some of them are farmers, though the numbers are dwindling. I just felt like it really suited the film, and I sent the link to Orla”
“One of them was a parking attendant,” says Orla. “I teach part time as a lecturer in art, and one of them, I could recognise his face. He was always hassling me if I was in a car, you know? So it was nice. Cara sent me that video, and I just want immediately ‘Wow! Can I rewrite the song a little bit?’ The change is very slight, but it changes the whole kind of religious thing into something more joyful.”
So was there anything that she was particularly keen to get into the film, to tell her own story?
“Well, yeah. I mean, I let Cara pick the parts out of the book that she liked, and then Cara did interviews with me. I think it was quite good, because I'm a bit of an expressionist so I tend to go on and on and on.” She laughs. “She has that real logic of what's important and what's not. And then she would send me bits of the interviews, and then I would rewrite them so they were a little bit more poetic and stuff.
“I was really interested that my own artwork would find its way in, that it wasn't totally on the farming side. I think Cara managed that really nicely, quite lightly. The images and the exhibition and so on, I think the chaos of trying to do all those things together comes across in the film.”
I tell her that I think that's a big part of the hook: people are not used to the idea of farming and art going together like that. When she decided that she was going to have to make art about sheep to make it work, was that a conscious process of working out what was possible or was there immediate inspiration from being around the sheep?
“It's totally addictive,” she says. “I still have a group of sheep out there and have three really good rams and I'm still wanting to continue. It was just inspirational from the beginning. I guess there was a kind of direct inspiration where you're using the actual materials to make the art, but then I learned felting and all that. Afterwards, I started to discover that I was actually studying my own childhood through doing this, and I became kind of an anthropologist. You know the way an anthropologist always has to do field work to get into the community, but I was in it because I was doing the work.
“Sometimes when I see art about farming, I get annoyed because people aren't doing the work, but that was really interesting, just to understand my own background through doing and understand, ‘Oh, that's why I paint like that.’ Some people have artistic parents or whatever, I didn't have that. Not at all.”
In the latter part of the film, it expands to take in bigger issues around ecology and sustainability. How did that shift in focus come about?
“I've been a vegetarian for 20 years,” says Cara. “I was interested in that side of things. I think it was a chance to kind of open up, for smaller farmers in particular, and look at the value that we as a society are putting on things, you know, like the value of oil or meat, or what is needed to get that out into the world. As Orla was saying, we did lots of interviews, had lots of conversations, and through that, the ideas of getting grants for rewilding, and what's at stake with that. And what's the motivation behind it, and neoliberalism and all that. I guess I was personally interested in asking those questions and bringing attention to the value of things again. There does need to be a radical change in farming, and nobody, as far as I can tell, is doing anything about it.”
Orla agrees. “I think that the important thing is well is that over the ten years that I've been doing farming and Art together, I have tried to develop a way of talking about ecology and stuff that isn't preachy. So the stories actually tell the story, like the little bit about what size the lamb chops have to be in the meat factory. I wrote another text recently about selling the stock ram, and am I going to become a tourist on my own farm? How can I manage still to farm? It's a little bit like, if you want to become a spokesperson for farming, you really have to give up farming. You can only do so much.
“I've been struggling to do ten different things at once all the time, and maybe it's time to close down a little bit. I'm writing, making performances, doing video. I'm going off on a tangent now, but I think it's important. How do you talk about ecology and the problems we're in, in an interesting way? We all know the problems, and actually, some of the problems aren't even farming problems, they’re just people and capitalism. If people have to pay a lot more for the products we eat, and computers and mobile phones and Zoom subscriptions – if the importance was put on that – we're so used to getting milk for 99 cents, because actually the supermarkets sell it at a loss to get people into the supermarket, so people think ‘Oh, a chicken is only worth four euros.’ No, no. I think the level of humour and sadness is played out well in the film as well.”
In trying to cut down on her commitments, she says, sheep are the hardest thing to give up.
“I'm still trying to figure out how to manage my art life and my sheep life. The farm will definitely be smaller, and there definitely will be a whole part for rewilding, so that I don't have to be busy with it. Those kinds of things are good for smaller farmers so that they have a way of making an income. But I mean, what's really important to know, is that in the book everybody I talk about, they're all part time, from the old people breeding the sheep to the people at the show. They can't make a living out of farming.”
I ask Cara what she’s planning to do for her next project.
“Something very different,” she says. “I’m in project developments. I'm really hopeful that it will get funded. Again, it's going to be kind of a hybrid documentary. What I'm really interested in at the moment is queer history in Ireland. It's something that’s rarely covered, and especially in film. In the UK, there were these telephone helplines called lesbian lines, and Ireland has quite a specific, unique story with them. They moved across the South and the North after they started in the late Seventies, in the context of Ireland's total oppression of us. I just find it fascinating.
“I've spent the last while talking to older queer women about their stories, and there are stories that I've never heard myself. It's a personal project as well, very much so. But again, I’m trying to work with the documentary and also move into kind of drama, experimental – how do you tell a history that actually doesn't really exist in an archive because nobody was archiving, in Ireland anyway?”
She’s delighted that the film was included in Docs Ireland, she says.
“It's pretty incredible. There’s 11 Irish feature docs, I think. They're really encouraging and they're really supportive.”
Sadly, Orla couldn’t make it to the screening – or the one at the Dublin Film Festival which saw it win Best Documentary – because they clashed with art shows. “I’d really love to see it with Cara and talk about how our work fits in with all that other Irish documentary,” she says.
“We’re still trying to find our feet really with all of that,” says Cara. “There's a traditional format of documentary, biographical stuff, and so it's a whole new world that we're trying to discover. And I'm sure it's there, and it definitely has a place.”
If you're interested in finding out more about Orla's work, you can check out her website, follow her on Instagram or see some of her videos on Vimeo.
