DABF25 Curator's Talk | Cowboys & Shepherds, Fieldwork & Studio

Join Selina Guinness alongside Adam Stead for a conversation with Orla Barry and Miriam O’Connor about what counts as work in art and agriculture. When wool is worthless, and raising beef-cattle barely viable without subsidies, how do we value pastoral lives? What does it mean to breed, feed and mind the sheep and cows we send to slaughter? Focussing on the work of sustaining flocks, the talk explores the lives of shepherds and cowherds as disruptive pinch-points in late-stage capitalism, as they tend people, place, produce, and practice in the contested rural environment.

DABF25 Guest Curator Selina Guinness presents her theme Flock through her Curator’s Programme including vibrant themed events and selection of books she has nominated, alongside her invited readers. Across the programme, Guinness examines all things pastoral: humans and beasts as herding creatures; the relational arts of shepherding; the impact of flocks on habitats; and how wary scapegoats too may flock to survive predation.

Orla Barry produces crossover artworks that blend text, narrative, performance, and visual art, inhabiting the space between theatre and gallery. Her work is based on real life experience as a research practice and uses techniques informed by auto-ethnography. Emigrating in the 90’s and lived for 16 years in Brussels, she now lives in rural Wexford where alongside her studio, she runs a successful flock of pedigree Lleyn and Galway sheep. Recently she has focussed on the tensions and contradictions between being a female artist and a farmer in rural Ireland; the subject of the recent documentary Notes from Sheepland (dir. Cara Holmes, 2024).

Miriam O’Connor is a visual artist from rural Cork. In her lens-based practice she draws inspiration from the sights, sounds and language of her everyday life. Using photographs, text and printed matter, her work has explored themes around looking and seeing; the relationship between camera and subject and the complex nature of photographic representation. Following her relocation to the family farm in recent years she occupies a dual role of farmer and artist, and is interested in engaging with the elasticity and functionality of photography in everyday agricultural life.

Adam Stead is a visual artist, agriculturalist and lecturer at the South East Technological University. Currently Stead is undertaking an interdisciplinary research-based PhD between Art and Agriculture. Stead explores the dichotomies of contemporary agricultural land use, ecology and the environment drawing on personal experience to challenge and raise questions of relationships between rural and urban demographics and ways of living. The economic need for farm diversification and off-farm income has created a new role for women to influence farming practice, land custodianship and rural representation where interdisciplinary cross-overs have inadvertently created space for the 'artist-farmers' - unique and powerful voices of our time.

Dublin Art Book Fair (4–14 December 2025) is a centre for contemporary artist books offering a wide selection of artist publications and titles from creative, small and independent publishers, both Irish or international, to browse or buy. In conjunction with the Fair, DABF presents an event programme of book launches, publishers talks, and workshops offering ways to engage and gain insight into contemporary independent and arts publishing.

Event location Information: This event will take place on the first floor accessible via lift and stairs. Seating will be theatre style. For further accessibility information please contact Learning + Public Engagement Curator Órla Goodwin.

DABF25 is proudly sponsored by Henry J Lyons and supported by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature and RTÉ Supporting The Arts.