Local Know How

Once, the ability to make, repair, reuse, forage, hunt, or grow formed part of a community’s shared know-how, passed through generations within the family home and local environment. This project begins from the understanding that such embodied, local knowledge remains a living resource for imagining more sustainable ways of living together today.

Drawing on Lucy Lippard’s writing on place-based knowledge—knowledge that is “written in the landscape or place by the people who live or have lived there”—the work seeks to re-situate knowledge within bodies, landscapes, and local histories. It values everyday, inherited skills not as nostalgia, but as forms of social and cultural knowledge shaped through long-term relationships with place.

Through collaboration with older members of the Cobh community, the project creates space for intergenerational listening and exchange, foregrounding lived experience and tacit knowledge that is often overlooked or displaced by industrial, market-driven systems. By recontextualising practices of making, repairing, sharing, and repurposing within a contemporary context, the work explores how resourcefulness can be understood as collective, held and renewed through exchange, storytelling, and shared action rather than individual self-sufficiency.

In doing so, the project positions artistic practice as a method for recovering, activating, and transmitting situated knowledge, and for reflecting on sustainability as something embedded in social relations, cultural practices, and everyday life.

Project created during the Creative Enquiry Residency Programme with Sirius Arts Centre, 2019