CORK-BASED artist Sarah Browne’s exhibition at the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh (until June 29) consists of a film entitled Buttercup and an installation.
The 28-minute film starts with a still of Sarah as a child in her First Communion dress, with her farmer father, and her pet cow called Buttercup. If that sounds like comforting bucolic simplicity, it’s a little deceptive as, from Sarah’s perspective – and that of the audience – there is a lot more going on.
The film is described as multi-layered, taking the form of a poem.
“The narrator explores the relationships implied in the photograph, between human and bovine behaviour, naming, domestication and wildness.”
With funding from the Arts Council’s Arts and Disability Connect Scheme, the film was made in consultation with a forum of blind and visually-impaired people.
Sarah, whose accolades include co-representing Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale, says: “Over the last number of years, my work has largely been developed and presented outside of gallery spaces, and it is exciting to bring my practice back to a gallery setting at Sirius.
Developing the work throughout short residencies in Cobh in 2023, I’ve become more familiar with this very particular setting – facing an island (former) prison – that has seeped into the concerns of the work.
“This exhibition is a part of a longer-form inquiry into the material culture of language, literacy and confinement in development with curator Miguel Amado.”
As Miguel points out, the exhibition “emerges from thoughtful and timely considerations of accessibility and the role of a gallery in fostering productive relationships with artists and a more inclusive approach to audience development.”
In the past, Sarah, a graduate of the National College of Art and Design, has presented work in venues such as a maternity hospital, a former children’s court and a public leisure centre.
Her film, Echo’s Bones (2022) was commissioned by Fingal County Council and co-created with autistic young people in north Dublin, responding to the work of Samuel Beckett.
Speaking about the film with the photograph of herself, her father and the cow, Sarah says it involves this apparently straightforward picture which is revisited repeatedly in attempts to describe it.
It also entangles those relationships of family, property, religion, connection to land, and a particular story about a cow.
It’s also an experiment.
“Increasingly, over the last four or five years, I’m thinking more about disabled experience, sensory difference and how that might change the work. The film is made in collaboration with an audio-describer I’ve worked with before, called Elaine Lillian Joseph. I worked very closely with her. I was very interested in the kind of precision and economy and poetics of audio description. There is such a craft to it.”
There are two versions of the film; one that is a narrative with captions on a different screen. In the second version is the narrative with additional audio description.
“The audio description is made for people who have some degree of sight loss or are blind. It provides them with the information when they can’t see what the image is. It’s a description in audio. For example, in a TV soap, it might describe someone closing a door; material that won’t be conveyed through speech.
“The captioning track is made with Daniel Hughes. It’s not just subtitles; it’s also a text, describing what sound is happening and what the environmental music is.
In the exhibition, everybody sees the captions, whether people need them or not. Lots of people actually find them beneficial and interesting.
Sarah says much of the content of the film “is thinking about what it means to perceive the world differently. It describes how cows experience the world. The film quotes different animal behaviourists who observe how cattle become nervous about certain things and get startled.
“Some of the research done by animal behaviourists is used to give animals a more comfortable life. It’s also used to control behaviour and bring them to death. So it’s not a straightforward benevolent knowledge.”
Death, Sarah says, is everywhere on farms.
Implicit in the film are questions as to what is learning and the control of animals and children.
“It’s not really about me. I guess it’s trying to think about this exercise in description; how do you describe difference without pathologizing it?”
Part of the exhibition is an installation called Safelight. It functions as a dark-room red light and suggests both a heating lamp for newborn animals and a Sacred Heart. This sculpture “attends to experiences of danger, perception and exposure.”
There is also a cattle tag and a St Brigid’s cross (St Brigid is the guardian of cattle) in the gallery space hosting the installation.
For Sarah, it’s important that everyone has access to experience art.
There’s also the idea that you could be an artist. It’s not only for (a small elite).
Originally from a farm in Kildare, Sarah lived in Dublin for years before recently settling in Cork. She finds the quality of life in the second city superior to what she experienced in Dublin and is heartened by the standard of artistic work, across the genres, in Cork.
Sarah comments that her idea of being an artist is in many ways aligned with her father’s choice to be a farmer.
“We’re both trying to pursue a meaningful life that also contributes something and, all the while, we’re trying to wrangle making a living out of that, dealing with various government departments, whether it’s the Department of Agriculture or the Department of Arts, to get grants from the Arts Council.”
Describing herself as “privileged” to be awarded funding for her art, Sarah says, however, that the life of an artist is always challenging. But she comes across as purposeful and dedicated to her practice.
