Episode 1

BRIDGET

Hello and welcome to ‘Deep Time’, a podcast in which we meet with artists to discuss time and its relationship to creative processes. With me, Bridget O'Gorman. Invoking the evolution of geological formation, ‘Deep Time’ is a non-conforming, collective research project, website and podcast series. It honours the accretion of knowledge inherent to crip, feminist, queer and decolonial thought.

‘Deep Time’ stems from ongoing research around holding space for my practice in a disabled body. It seeks to think about how complexifying what access is, and what it could be, might nourish broader approaches to working in the arts. Throughout the first half of 2025, I invited a group of artists and writers including D Mortimer, Deirdre O'Mahony, Libita Sibungu, Onyeka Igwe and Taey Iohe to take part in virtual and in-person slow conversations about time in relation to their own practice and its sustainment. Each participant was invited to make an offering which reflected their experience, which can be found at deeptime.ie, an accessible online publication launched as part of EVA International 2025.

In today's episode, we are delighted to be joined by Deirdre O'Mahony to talk about her work in progress as part of ‘Deep Time’. Deirdre lives and works in Ireland. She has an impressive 30-year track record in making work across sculpture, painting, installation and participatory projects. At the centre of this work is her interest in the politics of landscape, rural-urban relationships, rural sustainability and food security.

From large-scale paintings produced by tracing the shadows of boulders in the Burren National Park to setting up community spaces in the aftermath of a local conflict, XPO 2007, she deftly considers the role of art in bringing together diverse communities, alternate forms of knowledge, embracing art as a critical space to help us see things differently. O'Mahony's sound and moving image artwork, The Quickening, was commissioned and presented in a groundbreaking exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art, Dublin in 2024 and simultaneously screened in rural farms, halls and barns across the south-east of Ireland. Awards include Arts Council of Ireland Project and Bursary Awards, Irish and International Residencies and a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship. Her work is in public and private collections, including the Arts Council of Ireland and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Deirdre's pronouns are she, her.

Deirdre, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and for being a part of Deep Time. It's such an honour to have you! I wonder if we could start maybe by talking about your practice and about what interested you—or drew you—to saying yes to being part of the Deep Time project.

DEIRDRE

My practice, as you said, covers the gamut. I started out life as a painter and returned to live in Ireland from 17 years in London in the early 1990s. I suppose it was my experience of encountering conflicts about landscape and land use that prompted a shift in how I make my work. I began to make temporary public art projects and from that it triggered an important piece of work for me where I reopened a rural post office called XPO, in order to create a space for different kinds of publics and communities to come together, incidentally, in the Burren in County Clare.

Through that project I became interested in food production and looking at historical forms of food production, particularly the potato, and the way that highlighted the often invisible, unconscious attitudes around Irish identity and colonial history. I suppose with me it's always one project leads to another. So that got me thinking about that we were so dependent on a monocultural crop. It forced me to think about the whole notion of food security and sustainability and our current dependence on the major food producers to supply most of our food.

So I began to look at farming and food production through farming. One of the things that I wanted to do, I suppose I'll retrace a little bit here, we first met when I was doing a residency at IMMA and I was doing research about a film project, which was my way of kind of consolidating the history of nearly a decade at that point of projects, that kind of used a potato to uncover some of these kind of ideas. And so we, I think, got on very well when we first met and there was a lot of common ground, even though it mightn't have been apparent on the surface, but we shared a similar approach, I think, to making work.

So when I was doing research for a new project, which was a sound and moving image installation called ‘The Quickening’ for the Douglas Hyde Gallery, I held two feasts that were really designed to create a space for farmers, scientists and food policy makers to share a meal together. But it wasn't just going to be a straightforward meal and it was very orchestrated very carefully to kind of prompt people to depart from their usual kind of default modes of engaging with the subject of food and farming. And there were two key players in that project that I had to find as kind of actors. One was a Bean an Tí or a ‘Woman of the House’.

And immediately I thought of Etaoin Holahan, who runs Fenelly’s in Callan, who's a very good friend of yours. And the other person I thought of was you. And it was actually Etaoin who suggested you. Because I was looking at the idea of the straw boys who kind of go in and disrupt weddings.

And I was looking for something, some character that could inhabit that kind of disruptive process for the feast to highlight kind of who wasn't being heard maybe or what topics, what wasn't surfacing to just unsettle actual participants. And Etaoin suggested you and immediately it felt absolutely right. And at that point, we began having conversations about farming in particular, because you come from a farming background, which I hadn't realised at the time. And the way that farmers' voices, particularly smaller scale farmers' voices are not heard.

When ideas have yet to find a form—the anxiety of never really thinking that what you've just made is valid—I think that I certainly have huge anxiety around kind of imposter syndrome and each and every piece of work I go through that with. And I think it's something that doesn't often get shared openly amongst artists.

BRIDGET

And it's so interesting actually in terms of just thinking about how different our practices actually are, but how there are these underlying threads that are kind of always almost like reaching towards each other. And I'm just, this idea of disruption and this idea of voices that aren't heard necessarily, and maybe a sense for coming back to this kind of inherent knowledge that we all kind of carry within us due to our experiences of navigating the world. And I guess that's sort of partly why I wanted to initiate Deep Time, was this kind of desire to connect with other artists and writers and practitioners also interested in decolonial thought processes and embodied experience. Your whole practice and how that is feeding back in constantly into what you're doing every time you try something new.

And that no matter what, it felt like it was still a vulnerable space for you. Is that correct or not?

DEIRDRE

Oh 100% correct. Actually, our conversations and particularly the Deep Time weekend, I found refreshing and so almost revitalizing in a sense in the way that people were prepared to be quite open about the anxieties that they go through. Something I went on our retreat with was a memory that's kind of haunted me for the last six months.

BRIDGET

Okay.

DEIRDRE

Of doing a walk where I was the expert, I was the one with the knowledge and finding myself thigh deep in a bog and unable to pull myself out because my legs and my knees are physically just not strong enough to do that. And having to be lifted out in a very inelegant kind of way. And I think it was this sort of feeling of absolute horror at a future where my body just won't be able to do what I'm used to it doing, won't allow me to make my work in the same kind of way. And that's been niggling away and in a way it allowed me to make this particular audio work, which feels really raw and very personal.

And that phrase, the gagging suction of the leech-like past is actually a phrase that I came across when I was writing my PhD 12, 13 years ago now. And it comes from Sartre's Nausea. I came across it recently. I was reading an article in the Guardian about sliminess—and slime seems to be all over the place at the moment.

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In the early noughties, I'd made a body of work called ‘Visco’, which means slimy. And I had been thinking about Sartre's writing and the way that much and all as a nation, we'd like to, we can't shed our colonial past. It continues to stick to us. It clings to us in a way.

In a way that had both personal and those kinds of historical identity resonances for me. So I had been thinking a lot about my own childhood and the sense of kind of being perhaps a bit of the outsider in my family and certainly kind of very different and all that comes with being seen as different, much and all as people might love you. So that moment of carrying the traces of the bog around with me on my leg was kind of one of those, almost like a kind of epiphany. It made me realize, well, hang on, this is like the history that you won't acknowledge.

BRIDGET

It's so interesting what you're saying about sliminess and this idea of being bogged down or stuck. Like there is such, I guess, in terms of disability studies and thinking about crip joy and this idea that the body will do these things. Why are we so resistant? So in a way, with ‘Deep Time’, the idea was to keep things gentle and that that was the practice, to keep things soft and try to support the people in the group as much as possible.

That was the practice. And so that it doesn't feel like more labour piled on top of labour. And in a way, just kind of like to let our bodies speak, let our bodies tell us.

DEIRDRE

And I'm terrible at being slow. I want to be there yesterday.

BRIDGET

Yeah, me too. Yeah.

DEIRDRE

I can't. I find it really difficult. But my body's forcing me to behave differently, to learn, you know, kind of make my work differently. And it's, I hate that.

DEIRDRE

I really don't like it.

BRIDGET

It feels very dysphoric or something, doesn't it? This kind of like disorientating kind of like you would like to meet the deadline.

DEIRDRE

Definitely. But it also means that you never let go of anything. Like I'm haunted, you know. Haunted.

Haunted by ideas that kind of suddenly make sense in a different kind of way as I get older. There's something about making public the private—that is very powerful. And when it works, and it doesn't always work, you have to always take that risk.

But when it works, it speaks in a really powerful way that I think is recognized and understood by whoever encounters the work. So it speaks way beyond anything you might imagine when it was still in your head.

BRIDGET

I guess there's like this, again, this inherent knowledge that we all carry and we recognize something genuine or something really trying to be as honest as possible in the work. I think of ‘Deep Time’ in that way, I guess, as a sort of proposition or an opportunity to connect, pause together at this intersection, this kind of place where rather than wanting to create a finished work, or as worded by Libita Sibungu, who is one of the other researchers or artists in the project, ‘Deep Time’ is like an attempt. So that's the work.

But there is still something happening. We just can't see it.

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DEIRDRE

I totally, I totally identify with that. I think it so beautifully describes that process when we're doing nothing, but we're actually, I spent the last year working on a new project, but I've done almost nothing. The project has taken shape in that time. A year has gone by and very little actual engagement has happened.

What's happened has been important, but it's allowed the space for all the pieces of the jigsaw to come together. Very peculiar for me being on that retreat, because I used to take my children there, it used to be called the Bog Hill Centre. It's a place where I used to bring my kids. So my own histories were like coming at me.

BRIDGET

Yes, I'm interested in this idea of how the shape of the practice can change or can kind of be recontextualized, I guess, by recognizing these downtimes or what looks like downtime when it comes from the perspective of a funder or the actual industry itself. The work which goes unseen or unrecorded in your practice. Can you tell us any more about that?

DEIRDRE

For me, I suppose the attempt is the constant kind of reflection, trying to figure out the relationship between the ideas that I've been dealing with now for, actually, it's more than 30 years. It's close to 40 years. I see the attempt as a kind of pause and think about the process and think about the anxieties and the fears that come with the process and put myself in that space. So that's what I was trying to do with that piece that I've made for you, which I don't have a title for yet.

But I was trying to reflect on that space of trying to make sense of your own anxieties and how that's situated in relation to the artwork and in relation to personal life. Like you, I think, growing up and deciding to become an artist, you know, in the milieu of my wider family, that would have been measured in terms of, you know, are you selling work? Are you getting a job as a lecturer, getting a PhD? I see my own actions as a quest for validation.

There were moments when I really struggled with consequences of that quest as a mother, as, you know, I think a lot of that relentless drive to keep making work, it was also a kind of survival strategy. I have a bunch of people that I can talk to without reservation.

BRIDGET

Yes.

DEIRDRE

Yeah. And you're one of them.

BRIDGET

Being an artist can be very isolating, solitary, and it goes against everything we've evolved to be or what we've come from. We need community, we need people we can trust, and we need people who we know have our backs, because it can feel like we're often competing with each other all the time for different things.

DEIRDRE

That's reminded me that the one thing I really wanted to say, that thinking in public and speaking in public about vulnerabilities and finding a way of doing that, that is supportive and generous, is something that I recognised in your work a long time ago, particularly in the piece of work that you had in the exhibition that Iarlaith (Ní Fheorais) curated at VISUAL, a poster piece. And I found it so profoundly affecting, rigorous and honest and beautiful, and it did so many different things at once.

I sometimes get students coming back to me and they'll talk about, they'll talk about maybe something that I said that I had no recognition, whatever, about. But to have touched to touch people in that kind of a way is a real privilege.

So you've managed, that's been a constant in your work, but it's taken on a new form for this project, and it's a kind of transformative form.

BRIDGET

In terms of your research interests on a broader level, can you speak to how they intersect with time and slowness? And do you feel that your own embodied experience of time shapes your ways of working in any way?

DEIRDRE

I suppose the work that I made for ‘Deep Time’ is really simple. It's very straightforward. It's about the anxiety and frustration of coming up with an idea, and the notion of being judged, particularly in the context of EVA, which is an international biennial. So I, kind of going back to what we were speaking about in relation to, I suppose, being public, I decided it was time to put that anxiety out there.

So, and I was really prompted by the generosity of everybody at the weekend retreat, because I didn't get a sense of anybody holding anything back. Everybody was prepared to be vulnerable, and that gave me the space to make a piece of work that mirrored that kind of honesty and openness that was shared during the retreat.

And I have spent weeks, we talked about invisible time that goes in the work, the amount of time I spend prevaricating, kind of trying to think about what's going to work, haunted by the need to step up and kind of come up with something that would be honest and have the integrity of something that spoke to my own experience, but that could be situated within this wider art context was really daunting. So I had a really clear idea, kind of going into the retreat, this memory of getting stuck was something that had been there.

And what was brilliant was having the sound man that I love and work with all the time, John Brennan and Saskia Vermeulen, both were there as well to give a sound and moving image to kind of ideas that people might want to think through. So I decided to use that notion of getting stuck—and stuck in the bog—and just make a sound piece. And I hadn't originally intended to put any words to it, but just as a way of thinking through how to structure that, I then began to write. And then, we spoke earlier about how threads begin to come together or things you've dropped.

And that's when I was thinking about a sticky mud that couldn't be shed and thinking back to, oh yeah, that was Sartre, that was Visco, and that was this whole body of work that I made, these tiny photo-realist paintings of slime that I made in the early noughties. And having to run with that as a way of honouring the spirit of the commission.

The kind of offering was a way to think aloud really about vulnerability and the anxiety that comes with failing to produce that you and I have talked about so many times. I spent a lot of time working with these algal mats, these slimy algal mats in the noughties. And they're the result of eutrophication.

They're the result of too much fertilizer going on the land. They did relate to farming, but the paintings themselves, they look abstract, but they're actually hyper-realistic renderings of photographs that I was also taking at the time. And thinking about them as a kind of sign of mourning or something about that, God, I'm going to make a really tenuous connection now. But it's just like a lot of what I've been going through recently has been thinking about this idea of getting older and not being able to do the things that I used to be able to do.

So I wonder, yeah, in the way that often the work is ahead of us, was I thinking about that as a kind of lament?

BRIDGET

The Deep Time podcast is devised by myself and produced by Paul McGregor, consisting of three episodes with the support of Hannah Wallis and Iarlaith Ní Fheorais. Deep Time is made possible through the EVA International Platform Commission, Ireland's Art Biennial, Field Arts and the Arts Council's Visual Arts Project Award. Music courtesy of Audio Network.