You never miss the water until the well runs dry
The Shee Alms House, October 2023
Emerging Curator Award with Kilkenny Arts Office
A multidisciplinary exhibition featuring work by artists Mary Conroy, Bernadette Kiely, Laura Skehan and Claudia Breitschmid. Curated by Shannon Carroll.
This exhibition provided a meditation on our relationship with water, exploring past, present and future considerations of this relationship.
Inspired by local ecologies, changing landscapes and the future of our rivers and water sources, their work explores and attempts to understand a new landscape as we approach unknown and perilous times. This exhibition is an invitation to reflect on our connection to water. It is an invitation to consider our role or responsibilities as stewards of the lands, the water systems and the more-than-human.
These artists are challenging our ideas on the abundance of water and uncovering the complexities of our relationship to water. They generate possibilities of a new understanding of our connection to our environments, and hopefully enable a new relationship for our future.
This exhibition opened on Culture Night in September 2023 with a panel talk featuring exhibiting artist Bernadette Kiely and invited artist Marie Hanlon convened by Shannon Carroll. Supported by Kilkenny Arts Office and Kilkenny County Council, as part of the Emerging Curator Programme which I was selected for in 2023.
Exhibition photography by Maria Maarjberg.
‘Ní chailleann tú an t-uisce go deo go ritheann an tobair trim’ an old Irish adage, more commonly known as ‘you never miss the water until the well runs dry’.
A proverb familiar to many, it appears in various formats across different languages; it has been spoken, written and has inspired songs and music for decades.
Highlighting our longstanding relationship with water, this saying poses questions regarding not only our reliance on water, but the tendencies of many of us to forget this dependency and to take it for granted. Some things you only miss once they’re gone.
Stories of water and our connection to it have featured heavily throughout Irish folklore and mythology. As an island nation surrounded by water, this is no surprise. Tales of rivers as goddesses and powerful entities, surging water bodies, tumultuous seas and even magical wells set the scene for a people once so intimately connected with their land.
In a place such as Kilkenny, the only city in Ireland without a port, the connection to rivers and freshwater sources is especially strong.
In such folklore, rivers and sometimes other bodies of water around the country were often considered to work in conjunction with, or against, the people of the land. The fate of this fortune, usually lay in the hands of the leaders in Ireland. For good and sovereign kings, queens and leaders, rivers brought fertility to the landscape. There are tales of rivers rising up and flooding in order to protect armies and protect their people. However in times of lesser leadership, the river would become alienated and the land and its people could greatly suffer.*
If we were to consider this relationship today, how do we think the river would react? What sort of reign has guided this country, the people and the land? What type of guardians have we been to local ecologies, natural habitats and the more-than-human? Would we be considered as a good leader or a bad one?
Perhaps we can look to the rivers for answers.
* Manchán Magan, Listen to the Land Speak (2002), p. 10