Childhood Art

Field Presence: Revisiting a Transient Garden

On situated practice, precarious spaces, housing, labour, ecology and the relationships that make a place.

18 March 2017 — North Brunswick Street / Constitution Hill, Dublin 7

In 2017, during the second semester of my second year studying Sculpture & Expanded Practice at NCAD, I made a self-directed work in a little temporary garden at the junction of North Brunswick Street and Constitution Hill. I originally called it Urban Garden Presence #1. Revisiting the footage nine years later, I'm now calling it Field Presence.

It's interesting to return to something I made before I had the language I have now, and before some of the concerns that occupy my practice today had developed into the projects they are becoming. Or perhaps the concerns were already there, and I just hadn't quite figured out how to articulate them.

I've taken the original footage and edited it to include my current artist logos and visual identity, which have developed considerably since 2017. I've also created a version with a timer that counts up to sixteen minutes and fifty-three seconds, and another sped up to just over ten times the original speed, bringing the action down to around a minute and forty seconds. I like the idea of revisiting the work in this way. The timer gives us a sense of the actual duration, while the accelerated footage makes the action feel almost absurdly quick. Nine years of artistic development sit alongside a record of sixteen minutes and fifty-three seconds spent in a little garden in Dublin 7.

In the footage, I'm sitting and moving around this temporary space with a chair, drawing and writing, doing a few different things. The person filming is standing on the traffic island in the middle of the road. Cars pass on either side. People and animals move through the area. Some people stop and look; others keep going. You can hear children asking the person filming what I'm doing.

I find that detail particularly interesting. What is it that makes somebody stop? What makes somebody else keep walking? What does it mean to be doing something in a space that hasn't necessarily been designated for that activity? And what is the relationship between the person performing, the person watching, the person passing by and the environment in which all of this is happening?

The garden itself was transient. It appeared, and there it was. We didn't necessarily know what it was, what it was supposed to become, or how long it would be there. Looking back, I think about how quickly we approach spaces with the impulse to solve them. We see a field, a vacant site, an unused building or an awkward bit of land, and immediately we want to organise it, improve it, develop it or decide what it should be.

This connects with conversations I've been having with Gareth Kennedy through Situated Practice in Civil Society, particularly around critical ecologies, living systems, resilience and the relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. It also connects with our discussions of scale: the micro and the macro, the individual body and the larger systems in which it exists, the intimate experience of a place and the legal, economic and political structures that determine who gets to occupy it.

And it makes me think about a neighbour of mine called Kevin.

A neighbour without a front door

Kevin lived in a tent in the garden area for a period. I became acquainted with him through encounters in the neighbourhood, and I've seen him a number of times since. I've written a poem called Croms, dedicated to him, although I've never told him about it.

I remember being involved in door-to-door work with CATU, the Community Action Tenants Union, visiting apartments in the area as part of housing advocacy. I thought about Kevin and realised that I couldn't simply leave a leaflet in his letterbox. He didn't have a front door. He was still my neighbour, though, and I wanted to make him aware of what was happening with housing activism and tenant organising.

That moment has stayed with me. How do we decide who our neighbours are? How do we distribute information, resources and opportunities for participation? What happens when the ordinary mechanisms through which we communicate with one another don't accommodate somebody's circumstances?

I've been a member of CATU since experiencing difficulties around access to my own home, involving the blurred boundaries between private management companies and Dublin City Council as a landlord. It was frustrating to experience the apparent inability of the different parties to coordinate or collaborate, while the pressure fell on tenants who were already dealing with difficult circumstances.

I'm also a member of the Revolutionary Housing League, and I was involved in the occupation of Ardee House and the campaign around the Anne Devlin Community Centre. These experiences have shaped the way I think about housing, public space, private ownership and what it means for a community to have a place of its own.

The question isn't simply whether a building or a piece of land is being used. It's who gets to use it, who gets to decide what happens to it, and whose needs are recognised in those decisions.

The contrast between a vacant or underused property being left to deteriorate and a community trying to make a space available to people is particularly striking. The Anne Devlin Community Centre represented a different possibility for Ardee House from the prospect of another development of expensive accommodation. The building, its ownership and its future became part of a wider argument about what kind of city Dublin is becoming, and who gets to belong in it.

I don't want to turn Kevin's circumstances into a story that belongs to me, or to disclose more about his life than is necessary. But the fact that he occupied this little garden, and that the space was subsequently enclosed, has made me think about the relationship between the physical organisation of a place and the people who depend on it.

What does it mean to remove somebody from a space by changing the space itself? A gate can be described as a boundary, a security measure or a piece of infrastructure. It can also determine who is allowed to remain somewhere.

The field isn't separate from the social world. The people living in it, passing through it, watching it, maintaining it, neglecting it or attempting to control it are part of its ecology too.

The field doesn't always need solving

One of the things I've been thinking about through Gareth's work is the impulse to solve a space before we've really spent time in it. What if we didn't immediately have to organise the field? What if we could just be there, observe, listen, smell, pause and notice what was already happening?

During our recent discussions, we spent time attending to the field through different senses. There was the sonic experience, the olfactory experience, the act of slowing down and sharing something to drink afterwards. These activities made me think about how we learn about a place through our bodies, rather than solely through the information we can gather about it or the interventions we might make within it.

Gareth shared an apple, which made me particularly happy. It was a small gesture, but it stayed with me because World Teachers' Day had passed without my receiving an apple as a symbolic gesture of appreciation. More significantly, I hadn't felt particularly valued or recognised that day, and on the following day I found myself in a meeting in which an activity I'd undertaken was being challenged without, I felt, its pedagogical rationale being properly understood.

So the apple mattered. It was a simple act of sharing, and it made me feel acknowledged in a way I hadn't expected. Afterwards, we drank apple juice that Gareth had brought from home.

I keep returning to this because it demonstrates how something apparently small can become part of the story of a place. A shared apple isn't just an apple. It can be an encounter, an act of hospitality, an invitation to slow down. It can become a memory that connects an experience of a field with an experience of being cared for.

Gareth spoke about places becoming storied: acquiring histories and meanings through what happens there and through the people who encounter them. I like this idea because it makes room for experiences that might not appear in official accounts of a place. The story of a field isn't necessarily the story of its ownership, its planning permission or its eventual development. It's also the story of the people who spent time there, the things they shared, the conflicts that occurred and the relationships that formed.

We discussed heterotopia, the idea of spaces that exist in particular relationships to the wider social order, and I found myself thinking about the potentially anarchic dimensions of a field that isn't fully organised or controlled. This isn't to romanticise neglect or to pretend that conflict doesn't matter. The boys who entered the garden area, the burning of wooden structures, the response to that destruction and the introduction of surveillance all form part of the social dynamics of the place.

But what happens when we see these things as part of an ecosystem rather than as separate problems to be eliminated? What do we learn when we consider the psychological, social and political relationships at play, alongside the botanical and biological ones?

The field is not an empty backdrop. It's a living, changing space, and the relationships within it are not always comfortable, harmonious or easy to resolve.

The clown on a break

These questions have also brought me back to my own performance practice and to a project I've been wanting to bring to fruition: sleeping or resting in precarious places, on precarious surfaces, or in locations where the act of resting might seem out of place.

I imagine bringing a pillow, a blanket and some food, and installing myself somewhere temporary. I have an idea of taking my little blackboard out into a public space, setting myself up with the things I need and spending time there. It's connected to my What Do We Do? (Work to Rule) project, which examines teaching, labour, exhaustion and the conditions under which we are expected to work.

There's something interesting to me about the teacher as a body that is always expected to be doing something. The teacher is at work, preparing for work, recovering from work or thinking about work. Even rest can become another thing to organise around the demands of the job.

This connects with Disclown, where the clown appears to be on a break. In one iteration, the clown is situated against a white backdrop, apparently taking a moment to rest within the white cube of the gallery. The work coat remains on. The clown is on display, even while attempting to be off duty.

In another, the clown is eating soup or drinking tea, with a distorted face and an uncertain background. We don't know exactly where the clown is. The figure seems misplaced, displaced, unable to settle into a recognisable environment. The sounds of the classroom, the teacher's voice, the sobbing of the clown and the signs of exhaustion all become part of the work.

I am interested in that tension between being at rest and being on display. What does it mean to be permitted to rest only under certain conditions? What does it mean when a worker's exhaustion becomes visible, but the structures producing that exhaustion remain intact?

The proposed performances involving precarious places extend these questions beyond the classroom and the gallery. They bring the body into a space where its presence may be unexpected, where the surface may not be designed for rest, and where the distinction between public and private, permitted and forbidden, becomes more apparent.

I also think about my actions outside Dublin City Hall, when I planted myself there during a protest concerning housing and rent hikes. I used audio from homelessness services, including the freephone helpline, played through a loudspeaker. I engaged with people passing by, used chants and vocalisations, sat in the space and spoke with people, including counsellors as they left the building.

I had wanted to remain there for several hours. During the action, I spoke with Mannix Flynn, and our conversation turned towards the possibility of installing myself somewhere to sleep as a continuation of the concerns I had explored through the earlier Transience project.

He pointed out that a statue associated with the area had been taken in for protection from the effects of acid rain, and began describing some of his own artworks. I found myself interested in the possibilities that conversation opened up: the relationship between the body, public space, sculpture, vulnerability and the ways in which certain forms of presence are protected while others are made precarious.

It made me want to pursue the idea further.

What is natural, and what is urban?

In our discussions with Gareth, we also explored the relationship between urban systems and natural systems. It made me think about how easily we can treat nature as something separate, something to visit, preserve or introduce into an otherwise urban environment.

But the urban environment is already ecological. It contains plants, animals, fungi, human bodies, infrastructures, waste, water, sound and countless interactions between living and non-living things. The question becomes how we attend to these relationships, and how we might create more resilient ways of living within them.

I found myself thinking about boxing and cycling, activities that already bring people together around shared interests. What if a cycling group didn't simply meet, cycle and stop for coffee, but also gathered berries along the way? What if a boxing session was followed by sharing a particular juice, eating together or talking about bodily resilience?

Boxing involves physical defence. It also makes me think about biological defence, immunity and the body's relationship with its environment. Could care be grounded in that relationship between physical activity, the body, the social group and the natural world?

These are only possibilities at this stage. I'm interested in how an activity might become something more than its immediate purpose, without forcing it to become an overtly educational or environmental exercise. The ecological relationship could be woven into the activity itself.

Our conversations about fungi and mycelium have been particularly useful in this respect. Mycelial networks offer a way to think about connections that are distributed rather than centralised, relationships that may remain unseen but are nonetheless consequential, and forms of organisation that don't necessarily resemble familiar institutional structures.

This is relevant to the mapping and manifesto work we're undertaking with Brian Hand, and to my research into Hayes Valley Farm in San Francisco. I'm interested in how communities form around shared environments, how knowledge circulates, and how ecological thinking might inform social and cultural organisation.

It also makes me think about the Polish tradition of mushroom picking in my husband's family and the ways in which gathering food can become a social practice. The activity isn't only about finding something to eat. It can involve knowledge, memory, conversation, attention and a relationship with a particular landscape.

I think, too, about the destruction of trees in the city, including the tree on O'Connell Street that has featured in my own thinking and writing. We can become very attached to particular trees and landscapes, and we can feel genuine outrage when they are damaged or removed. This raises questions about what we recognise as valuable, what we consider worth protecting, and why some forms of life seem to receive more public attention than others.

I've also been thinking about the term solastalgia, which describes the distress associated with environmental change in a place one knows and inhabits. It feels relevant to the experience of watching familiar environments change, particularly when those changes are imposed by development or other forces over which local people have little control.

The loss isn't necessarily just the loss of a tree, a garden or a field. It can also be the loss of relationships, routines, memories and possibilities that have accumulated around it.

Time, language and the stories we tell about space

Another thread running through these reflections is language: the words we use to describe a space and the assumptions that those words carry.

A field can be described as vacant, unused, neglected, derelict, wild, productive or underdeveloped. Each description implies a different relationship with the place and a different idea of what should happen to it.

The same applies to people. Someone can be described as a resident, a neighbour, an occupier, a trespasser or a problem. These terms do not simply describe a situation; they can shape how that person is understood and treated.

This is one reason I remain interested in the relationship between art, activism and the politics of representation. The way we name a place, an action or a person can determine what becomes visible and what is pushed to the margins.

Our discussions of time have also made me consider how places carry the past into the present, and how the present is already shaping possible futures. COVID changed many people's relationships with nature, technology and public space. It also made visible how differently people experience isolation, access to outdoor space and the security of having somewhere to live.

I am interested in how situated practice can attend to these overlapping timescales: the immediate experience of a body in a place, the history of a community, the longer life of an ecosystem and the future consequences of decisions made now.

The field in my 2017 footage is a small example, but it opens onto these larger questions. Its temporariness is part of its significance. The space is neither outside history nor separate from the city. It exists within a set of relationships that continue to change.

Returning to the field

I keep thinking about the title Field Presence. The word presence suggests being there, but it also raises the question of what it means to be present, and to whom that presence becomes apparent.

In 2017, I placed myself in a temporary garden and undertook a series of actions. In 2026, I am revisiting that footage while thinking about housing activism, community, precarious spaces, teaching, labour, performance and ecology. The work has not changed in the footage itself, but my relationship with it has changed.

Perhaps this is one of the useful things about returning to earlier work: it allows you to recognise connections that were not fully apparent at the time, without pretending that you always knew where the work was going.

The field makes me think about Kevin, about people being excluded from spaces through the introduction of gates and other forms of control, about the possibility of resting in public, and about the ways in which artists and communities might engage with places without immediately trying to resolve them.

It makes me think about mycelium, about networks and interdependence, about the relationship between a body and its environment, and about how care might be embedded in the ordinary activities through which people come together.

It also makes me think about the limits of what art can do. An artwork cannot, by itself, resolve housing precarity or determine the future of a neighbourhood. But it can make certain relationships visible, create opportunities for encounter, and allow questions to remain open long enough for us to consider them differently.

I'm interested in continuing to explore these questions through my work with Gareth, through the research around Hayes Valley Farm, and through future performances involving temporary occupation, rest and precarious surfaces.

For now, returning to Field Presence has helped me recognise that the concerns I am exploring today have a longer history within my practice. I was already interested in what happens when a body occupies a space, how people respond to that presence, and what becomes possible when we spend time somewhere that might otherwise be overlooked.

Perhaps we don't always need to solve the field. Perhaps we need to spend time in it, pay attention to what is already happening, and consider what kinds of relationships we might cultivate there.

And perhaps the most interesting thing is that, nine years later, I'm still asking questions of a little temporary garden that appeared in Dublin 7, and of the relationships that made it a place at all.