Photography’s power to influence our perception of the natural world and its fragility has been gaining impact with the rise in awareness of climate change.
Photography’s power to influence our perception of the natural world and its fragility has been gaining impact with the rise in awareness of climate change. ‘We Feed the UK’ is a major arts project pairing acclaimed photographers and poets with regenerative farmers and other custodians of land, soil, sea and seed.
Irish photographer Yvette Monahan is one of ten commissioned artists in the latest series. At the heart of her visual essay ‘The Clean Blue of Linen’ is the Mallon Farm in Co Tyrone, where flax farmers Helen Keys and Charlie Mallon are reviving chemical-free flax farming as part of a sustainable agricultural model. Monahan visited their farm over a year, catching the turn of each season. ‘The project embodied the intangible heritage of the natural world, which I am very interested in,’ she says. ‘It was a living, storied landscape and a wonderful story of the transformative power of personal passion.’
Monahan’s images are absorbing, seductive and sumptuous, capturing the stages in the development and production of flax – growing the flax in a lush, green universe, for example, or its graceful sway in a gentle breeze. There are images, too, of the processes of producing the flax, bringing it from seed to the bunches which are dried and stooked.
‘The Clean Blue of Linen’ is astute and technically accomplished. Monahan explains that ‘it was inspiring to create a visual story of everyday acts of practical reverence’.
Complementing her images is The Opposite of Apocalypse, an ode to flax farming by acclaimed Irish writer Abby Oliveira.
Monahan’s photographs are showing at Belfast Exposed until 22 March. All the commissions will feature at a show at the Royal Photographic Society in Bristol in April.
Stephanie McBride
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