A Woman’s Culm
2021
Commisioned as part of the Decade of Centenaries
‘A Woman’s Culm’ is a single-channel film, an artistic response to the commission call-out under the ‘Local Legacies 1921/2021’ Community Strand of the Decade of Centenaries Programme in County Kilkenny. The short cine-poem, centred on the upland areas along the Castlecomer Plateaux, makes visible rural women’s day-to-day struggles that resonate with Ireland’s War of Independence era. By ‘keeping the home fires burning’ women not only maintained the home and family but also provided support to the 600+ men of the Castlecomer Battalion. Their tasks included administering first aid; message-carrying; weapons carrying; secrecy and providing safe houses to those on the run, and keeping equilibrium in the face of the unknown.
The cultural practice of ‘culm’ making – unique to coal mining areas – meant that women’s hands became fighting tools and the raw materials that made up ‘buns’, ‘bungs’, ‘bumbs’, or ‘culm bombs’ – a mixture of coal dust, yellow clay and water – formed by the women’s hands became a measure of their labour. Believing these female personal narratives – where generational learning and grounded knowledge are universally contemporary, this material object (similar in shape and size to a Mills bomb) embeds resilience, self-sustainability and commemoration alike. And while the short film occupies a borderland where past realities are remembered in the present and historical re-creating mingle, the collaborative processes and social engagements as a result of making the film have created new intra-rural connections and collaborations that, not only speak to the past but to the future too. As we become more aware of the global climate crisis this material object comes into focus once again as the world attempts to transition from fossil fuel to green energy – the human/nature struggle continues. This is at once personal, national and global in scale.
