The Artlink project The Winnowing Basket is an art trail presented in May 2025 within three parks and commons (Swan Park in Buncrana, Barrack Hill Park in Carndonagh, The Bath Green in Moville) across the Inishowen peninsula in County Donegal, Ireland.

Bbeyond travelled to Buncrana to celebrate a Performance Monthly as part of the Festival.

The Artlink project The Winnowing Basket is an art trail presented in May 2025 within three parks and commons (Swan Park in Buncrana, Barrack Hill Park in Carndonagh, The Bath Green in Moville) across the Inishowen peninsula in County Donegal, Ireland.

“There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me. 

The sign was painted, said ‘Private Property.’ 

But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing. 

This land was made for you and me.” 

(One of the ‘lost’ verses of “This Land is Your Land”, Woody Guthrie 1940) 

Who gets to demarcate the private and the commons, to write the legacies and heritage of our past, present and future, to define what counts as antiquities or heritage or loot? 

The word ‘loot’ comes from Hindustani into English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first uses of the word ‘loot’ in English were related to the capacious extraction of profits, resources and riches from India by history’s original ‘corporate raiders’, the empire-building corporation/army The British East India Company. There are traces of such history in the three parks and commons (Swan Park in Buncrana, Barrack Hill Park in Carndonagh, The Bath Green in Moville) of the Inishowen peninsula, within the many diverse aftermaths, legacies and bequests that still influence 

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Inishowen’s present and futures. The 2025 Artlink project The Winnowing Basket invites artists to look at Inishowen and its three parks or commons (Swan Park in Buncrana, Barrack Hill Park in Carndonagh, The Bath Green in Moville) and to trace the encounter with diverse histories such as these, histories that have navigated outwards across oceans into empires and that have acquired, accumulated, rebelled, conformed, collected, and bequeathed. 

The project is funded by Arts Council Ireland and curated by Declan Sheehan and Artlink.