It has taken a while, but Cara Holmes’s delightful study of Orla Barry, artist and shepherd, now receives a welcome cinema release following its premiere at the 2023 Dublin International Film Festival. To say the film combines multimedia expression with meditations on the morality of agriculture would be to mislead as to the sheer fun to be had. Notes from Sheepland has real intellectual muscle. It engages with the debilitating pressures of life on the land. But it is also infused with good spirits. A warning against our habit of anthropomorphising the natural world does not dissuade the film-makers from discussing the naming of beasts or from including a winning shot of a sheepdog baring its teeth at disrespectful hens. “Gillian just looked like a Gillian,” Barry says of one sheep.
Barry may not forgive us for making facetious comparisons with Clarkson’s Farm. It seems unlikely she had the financial cushion that Clarkson boasted when he embarked on the series for Prime Video. But superficial similarities do kick up as Barry explains how, after 16 years making art in Brussels, she made her way back to Wexford and took over a sheep farm. It is suggested she may take the less strenuous option of growing salad. Her “ovine eyes” look elsewhere. “I escape the studio by going to my sheep. I escape the sheep by hiding in my studio,” she says, early on.
The juxtaposition of the two worlds sets up a winning tonal see-saw: now down to the philosophical, now up to the playful. This is never more clearly in evidence than in a lambing sequence – scored to percussive rumbles – of which Luca Truffarelli’s camera makes a medieval hellscape. Such images (and Barry’s background) suggest the influence of gallery-based video, but the film is, for the most part, an accessible entertainment that knows when to cut towards playful diversion. Hannah Miller turns up to blast an alpine horn across the unsuspecting countryside. Wexford Male Voice Choir bellow on a nearby knoll.
Throughout it all Barry’s gentle voice both soothes and unsettles as she addresses her own uncertainties about how life has turned out. Some will see her as the author here. But Holmes’s ability in maintaining a unified sweep should not be underestimated. A tidy treasure.
Notes from Sheepland is in cinemas from Friday, July 26th
