Manure, at its linguistic roots, means to work by hand. The cycling of nutrients like nitrogen through food and our excrement, from hand to hand, entangles our bodies with terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems as well as planetary cycles. Industrial interventions into these cycles like the nitrogen-fixing Haber-Bosch process, render once precious materials like human and animal faeces and the organic nitrogen fixations of legumes into an extraneous by-product, a wasteful surplus. These interventions in abundance leave planetary scars: fish kills in once lively rivers and dead-zones in coastal waters, but they also mark in our own bodies. Half of the nitrogen in the body of an average human is synthesised using the Haber-Bosch process where fossil fuel is burned to pull nitrogen from the air. Like our bifurcated bodies, the added fossil energy splits these nonreactive nitrogen molecules in two so they can be be more easily taken up into the bodies of plants, livestock, and humans.

Handiwork uses archival and original footage, music, sound, and movement to examine these dynamics in the context of Ireland’s waterways. A creative expansion of ongoing historical research into the industrialization of Irish dairy farming and its polluting effects, the film is an attempt to situate this history in the audience’s bodies and to explore what insights can be gained when examining historical research through a creative lens.