The Green Room Exhibitions – Megan Luddy O’Leary.

about

“Chomh bán le bainne /Chomh milis le mil / Chomh dearg le fuil.”

as white as milk/ as sweet as honey / as red as blood . (trans.)

(NFC, 0023 : 190)

(Anna Ní Fhathaigh, School’s Collection, Duchas c. 1920s.  )

Joyce says that the soul of Ireland is trapped in a net; it is also collected there. To create ourselves we must reach into that fishing net, that lacework, that woven basket. Do our fingers catch in the gaps?

Owing a great debt to the scholarship of Martín Mac Con Iomaire, Bríd Mahon, Kevin Danaher, Jennie Moran and the thousands of voices woven into the Dúchas Schools collection, my art practice explores and reimagines the patchwork history of cooking culture in Ireland. It does so in the hopes of easing a  painful cultural memory of famine, fasting, hunger strikes, institutionalization and food insecurity, which today manifests in the prevalence of disordered eating and Ireland’s disregard for the nutritional needs of those in our care.

Drawing on the aforementioned scholarship, persevering folklore, medieval Irish literature, traditional craft methods (patchworking, Irish lace, delft ceramics), as well as my love of cooking with my friends, the work develops a joyful visual language for Irish cooking. The artistic outcomes of my research into food history tend to root themselves in Irish craft traditions, such as Irish lace crochet, quilting and weaving, underscoring the idea that Irish cooking deserves to be revived with the same significance in our culture as the aforementioned crafts.

The exhibition opening will feature hand-drawn looping animations showing step-by step instructions of how to cook some traditional regional dishes which have fallen out of the culture as a result of colonisation, famine, etc.,

Knowing the level of destruction to people and culture caused by orchestrated famine, in Ireland historically and now as it happens in Gaza, I believe in the significance of reconstructing our food culture in a way which contradicts the individualistic and destructive philosophy of colonization. If the art of colonization is line and boundary, our art must be holding, gathering, sharing.

Artist Bio

Megan Luddy O’Leary is an award winning artist and illustrator from Cork. Her work has been featured by Gill books, Culturlann MacAdam O’Fiaich, and Vittles Magazine. Her art practice explores domestic cooking as a signifier of culture. “Chomh milis le mil” (2025), Black Box, Belfast, represents the culmination of her research into Irish cooking history so far. Her work about cooking has been featured by Vittles Magazine (2023), Outset Design Galway (2024) the Irish Arts Review (2022), Profiles Magazine (2023), Aitiuil Magazine (2023/25), and has been exhibited by Herman Auctioneers, Dublin (2024), Copper House Studios, Dublin(2023), Bankley Gallery, Manchester (2024), Entresuelos (2025) and the Mermaid Arts Center, Wicklow (2023). 

Her work on this theme was exhibited at the NCAD Degree show 2022 and has been highlighted by Vittles Magazine as part of their season on Food and the Arts (2023). Her short animated film, “habit of hands”, about irish women’s relationships to cooking was awarded the IDI Graduate Award for moving image 2022.  Her practice uses illustration, ceramics, lace crochet, quilting, mixed media painting, and embroidery to explore cooking as a folk tradition often passed between women orally and through bodily gestures. In Ireland that tradition was interrupted through  colonial violence. Loss of traditional cooking, organized famine, food insecurity,  and histories of institutionalization all conspired to destroy Irish Cuisine. Luddy O’Leary’s work aims to imagine a joyful visual expression for a neglected aspect of Irish culture.

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