Laney Mannion is a Multidisciplinary Artist from Roundstone in Connemara. She employs ethnographic techniques in her work and research around rural policy implementation. Graduating with a BA Fine Art in 2018 from CCAM, ATU Galway (formerly GMIT), she went on to complete a master’s in Social Practice and the Creative Environment from LSAD Limerick in 2019. After a decade away, she moved home to rural Ireland, gaining insight as both an outsider and insider in her community.
With this fresh perspective, and within the confines of a global pandemic, supporting her father on the family farm she created the photography project ‘My Father Works the Land’ (2020-ongoing).
Throughout this time, the ferocity of the landscape in the silence of lockdown never escaped her view. In 2021 supported by the Arts Council of Ireland’s Agility Award, she developed a project titled ‘This Roaring Land’. In this project, she created a series of woodblock prints based on poetry she had written depicting the changing of the seasons, along with audio sound pieces from her gathered field recordings of weather patterns, the changing of the tides, as well as the return of migrating birds.
From 2021 to 2023, Laney in collaboration with a group of hill farmers on the North Connemara Locally Led Agri-Environmental Scheme EIP. This project, titled ‘Our Hearts Are in the Hills,’ involved interviewing and gathering stories of their life and experiences within the Connemara mountains, while researching the impacts of historical and contemporary agricultural policy on farming practices.
In 2023, she was awarded the Agility Award for her ongoing investigation into rural policy implementation, carrying out workshops with new materials polyresin and fibreglass in order to further expand her sculptural practice.
(2024) Laney is currently working on her new project which delves into the sociolinguistics of place with particular emphasis on the west of Ireland.
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