14.07.2025

There had been a heatwave for a couple of weeks but it had finally broken this day last year. It was lashing rain and fairly gusty by the time we got to Muine Bheag to interview visual artists Mark Buckeridge and Leah Corbett in the Renault 4 for an episode of K7 dans la 4L.

We’d arranged to meet in Mark and Leah in a car park outside the swimming club on the River Barrow so we drove there early to get the Twitch set up. As the second longest river in Ireland, the River Barrow once served as a vital trade and transport route. From the 18th century onwards, 23 locks and lateral canals were built on the Barrow allowing horse-drawn barges to carry goods like sugar, stout and beet between Athy, Carlow and Waterford. And Muine Bheag, formerly Bagenalstown had once been a mill town, an important stop along the route.

Before the interview and between rain showers, objects, artworks and musical instruments that were stacked on the back seat had to be moved and reorganised, packed away ahead of the interview. Mark and Leah arrived, while we were making space for them in the back seat and we started chatting. We had the boot of the Renault 4 open and some things out on the tarmac, when a plastic bag that Liliane brought from her late father’s remise in France was suddenly whipped out from a cavity in the boot and taken up in the breeze. The bag, with the words thank you on both sides, seemed grateful for its freedom as it flitted up into the air on the gusts, thank you, thank you. The four of us watched it glide away from the river and up the Leighlinbridge road until a jeep rounded the corner and caught it underneath the chassis.

We’d been eager to meet with Mark and Leah to hear more about COMMUNE, about this project of establishing and circulating contemporary art in a rural area and creating a very buzzy and exciting grassroots, in situ platform for public sculpture.

COMMUNE has become a staple on the contemporary art calendar, drawing visitors from all over Ireland, and it is much anticipated by the residents of Muine Bheag. Unexpected art-works appear around the town each year for a week in August with a series of performances and talks inviting, ‘artists, community organisers, graduates-in-residence, gardeners, zine-makers, visitors and friends to contribute to an evolving and expanding programme’.

Below is an interview with Mark and Leah that took place this day last year in the Renault 4 while we drove to sites in the town associated with COMMUNE. Here, we chat about recent projects and initiatives focusing on COMMUNE which supports emerging and established artists by commissioning new works of art, and in collaboration with the local community, it promotes contemporary art outside the city context. This contemporary art mapping of Muine Bheag gives great insight into the types of projects Mark and Leah run, as well as some interesting side stories and background information about curating, making and installing artworks, utilising the infrastructure, historic sites and architecture of the town. The best way to describe COMMUNE is…, ‘Leah notes, ‘that it’s really a culmination of projects we’ve been working on throughout the year, and then it has this public moment’.

Our first stop, an artwork by Cóilín O'Connell called, Counterfeit Coin. We parked opposite the mill, cut the engine and the got low down before heading to the next stops to reflect on artworks by Colm Keady-Tabbal, Rory Mullen, Mollie Anna King, Holly Pickering, Chloe Maguire, Lily O'Shea, Cian Lawler….amongst ruins, across the river, in a disused shed, on a public notice board, near the mill, by a neo-classical train station built in 1850, in the town hall.

After a lap of the town, Mark says, ‘let’s put the Joe Heaney on’ and for the rest of the interview we’re listing to tapes and shooting the breeze…