Art and the essence of farming Manchán Magan
7 min read Mary Burke’s exhibition At Home on the Farm avoids bucolic cliche to catch rural functionality
Farms don’t feature much in art, except as bucolic backdrops in landscape scenes and pastoral vistas. This makes a new exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art all the more intriguing. It’s by the artist Mary Burke who was commissioned by the gallery to draw the barnyards, fields and livestock of five different Limerick farms.
For Burke it was an opportunity to change direction after four decades of focusing almost exclusively on suburban scenes; capturing the humble homeliness of streetscapes in exhibitions titled Suburbanscapes (1992), Suburban Shadows (2010) and Suburban Narratives (2016).