Cloud Cuckoo Land

Since 2016 I have worked collaboratively with island farmers on Sherkin Island to address social and political issues in regards to rural Ireland, bureaucracy, and the GLAS scheme. GLAS (Green, Low-Carbon, Agri-Environment Scheme) is a scheme designed essentially to financially award farmers for farming in an environmentally friendly manner, however, to comply with the regulations farmers have to fill out a huge amount of unnecessary paperwork, making this government scheme, which was designed to be beneficial, into an absurd bureaucratic challenge. One of these nonsensical tasks was to confirm the presence of the red-beaked bird, the Chough on the island. The absurdity of this process is parodied through interpretations of Aristophanes Greek play, 'The Birds', which is famous for the phrase 'cloud cuckoo land'. Using the play, I engaged the community in a collaborative process, which materialised these issues through discussion, dance events, mask-making workshops and poetry readings. This final work combines filmic representations of these processes that are presented in two constructed life-size bird boxes.