At Marta Faye we are interested in all kinds of people, people with a story to tell. We are conducting a series of interviews and photoshoots with some individuals who we find inspiring. We are delighted to publish our conversations and photos here with great insights into the work, the passions and the everyday lives of these people. Our first interview and photoshoot took place recently in Kilkenny with Suzanna Crampton. Read more below:
Suzanna Crampton is a farmer, writer, teacher, woollen blanket designer and photographer living on her family farm in Kilkenny. Her first book Bodacious The Shepherd Cat was published by Harper Collins in 2018 and gives an insight into everyday farm life through the eyes of her cat Bodacious. Suzanna is passionate about sustainable and ethical farming. In her book you will find a wonderful quote by Aldo Leopold; “We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect”. We had the pleasure of talking to and photographing Suzanna on her farm on a dark wintery day in November in the company of five dogs, three cats, horses, alpacas, zwartbles sheep, doves and chickens.
On growing up
I was born in New York City and christened just up the road from here in Ennisnag. We lived in New York City for the first five years of my life, then my father got a job in a beautiful small town called Charlottesville Virginia. He became a teaching Professor of Cardiology at the University of Virginia, so my parents moved down there with all of us. In those days children flew very inexpensively, my sister and I were regularly shipped across the Atlantic to Ireland every summer with cardboard tags around our necks telling the air hostesses our names and telephone number for our Grandparents in Kilkenny. So I spent time growing up in Ireland too.
The beginnings of an interest in animals and land
Over here in Kilkenny my grandparents had a market garden, it is a walled garden. They grew loads of vegetables and fruits, we would pick them and help sell them at the local country market. It was a very family-oriented thing and every day you had to pick a certain amount of fruit such as gooseberries, raspberries, red and black currents. We helped our grandmother pick bunches of flowers. In those days there weren't florists so there were a huge amount of flowers in the garden. In the USA I also had a very old cousin in Maryland on my father's side of the family, she was called “Cousin Anne” and she had a farm. She was an amazing woman to have known having been born in late 1800s. She had seen the evolution of farming from only horse power to petroleum/diesel power. When she started her farm life she worked with horses pulling the plough which evolved into tractors and she also lived to witness man landing on the moon. So I've had an interest in farming from both sides of the Atlantic.
On being Irish and American
Both countries and both cultures are mixed within me which is who I am. I think being comfortable with who you are is one of the biggest things in life and to always be yourself. So I can't claim to be totally Irish but I can't claim to be totally American either because through culture and through bloodlines I’m kind of a mixed breed if you will, but if you look at the domestic animals that are of mixed origin they’re usually the hardiest!!!
The first animal
My earliest memories are of a cat that we had in New York City called California Cat, a manx cat with no tail. We lived in a small apartment in a house that was condemned for demolition. It was one of the last remaining wooden clad houses in that area. California Cat came down to Charlottesville Virginia when we moved but he was used to the safety of being in an apartment and when he arrived in Charlottesville, sadly, he was soon hit by a car!
On what animals can teach us
I think animals can teach humans about the language of body language. We have become too dependent on the spoken word as a form of communication and lost the ability to understand and read body language. If you're working with animals and you read their body language you can tell if they're unwell, which way they're going to move and what kind of temperament or humour they’re in. Humans are predators; our eyes are in the front, we don't have the peripheral vision that a prey animal has. When you're confronting a sheep or a wild horse or a cow face on, to them you're a predator, so if you give them a profile then you're not perceived as aggressive.
The family farm, Kilkenny
It's been in the family since around 1800 we think but we are still finding out more information as we go which is still so fascinating. We’ve only recently made discoveries that my family might have been renting it from about 1800 and then finally bought it in the 1850s. There's a book we have here in the house that has parts written by a great great great great grandfather in 1800 about looking after sheep. He describes the type of sheep local to this area and how to look after them and what they ate. In those days sheep were milked and a flock of sheep was assessed by how many cheeses it produced per day. These cheeses were sold locally in Kilkenny City. The idea that Ireland had an industry of sheep dairies and it was considered a normal thing in those days, today people find it extraordinary!
On women in farming
If you look back at our primitive history I believe it was women who were the original shepherds and farmers. Men were hunters and we women would be gathering fruits, nuts, grains, roots and vegetables. Potentially a woman would have stumbled upon a young lamb and as women we could have breastfed milk to an orphaned lamb. Once you feed an orphan lamb it follows you wherever you go, so essentially it becomes domesticated. That's one reason why I think lambs were probably the first animal to be domesticated and how women were the first to venture into early domestication of livestock. It follows on that it was women who gathered seeds and vegetables. They would have found that the seed crop or vegetables were more prolific in the areas where the animals grazed and rested due to the increased fertilization of the abandoned manure. So why couldn’t those women throw a few more seeds near manure in anticipation of returning to that area at a later date to find an increased amount of food for themselves and their tribal family.
Women were the mothers, midwives, who gathered the harvest and cooked, while men hunted and protected the tribe. Men had and needed a blinkered concentrated focus for hunting after prey animals. Women had to look and think laterally, to forage for food, watch and nurse children, have herbal knowledge, as well as watch out for dangers, so they would’ve always tried to think of an easier way to accomplish the multiple tasks they had to do to survive and thrive.
As for modern farming, when electric milking came in, it was then that more men came into the milking parlour. I'm not dismissing men at all but men were not called milk maids, women were. Many men did milk cows but universally if you look at it, it was the women who milked cows, made butter and cheese and then the men brought the produce to the market. It's always been a team effort but I think in the last 100 years or so it has become more segregated. A lot of women in Ireland call themselves “the wife of the Farmer”, they don't recognize the fact that they're actually farming. It's a cultural kind of normalizing, where the value of what women put into a farm economy is not recognized. This has been changing a lot in the last few years and women are standing up to be counted and recognized for what they are doing.
My grandmother was an amazing strong minded woman, my mother is much like her. That’s not to say that my grandfather and father were submissive, it was more of an equal standing between them, an understanding and mutual respect. This is also what the most successful farms and businesses have; they value the team effort, because of the different ways men see things compared to the ways in which a woman sees things. When there's a good cohesive relationship you get a very successful farm business. We are a species that are sociable and we should be just like ants or honeybees, we work much better as a cohesive unit.
Susan Butler and Hubert Butler, Suzanna’s Grandparents.
Susan Butler was one of the founding members of the Kilkenny Arts Festival. In her day it was called the Kilkenny Arts Week. The Butler Gallery in Kilkenny Castle is named after my grandmother and grandfather who were both instrumental in the founding of the gallery.
There's a very altruistic thread that has run through our family for some time which has been about helping establish things like The Kilkenny Arts Festival and the Butler Gallery. Susan Butler was a very talented painter and artist. When she married my grandfather Hubert Butler she married into being here, working in the garden and on the farm. My mother is an only child but lots of other children would come here because of the war, World War 2, so lots of children were raised here by my grandparents.
My grandmother was more of an artistic soul. My grandfather Hubert was a market gardener for his income and also a wonderful writer and essayist, hugely admired by people worldwide for his writing. He was a very independent man and my grandmother a very independent woman, they were very much upholders of truth and facts, which is a thread that has continued on through my own mother, father and siblings. We like to find out and make sure that we know what is fact and what is fiction, always questioning. For example when I was 14 I went to my grandfather. He was writing in a room we call the library as it’s wall to wall books. I asked “what is the Holocaust?” He just turned and literally pulled out a book about Belsen. It was about the concentration camp called Belsen and he said “read that”. Then when I wanted to know about the Peace Marches in Northern Ireland he handed me a book about Bernadette Devlin that was published at the time and when I was finished reading we would have a conversation.
An artist’s retreat and a second book
Tyrone Guthrie was my Great Uncle, brother to my Grandmother Susan Butler. He was a theatre director, an opera director and a writer and he is well known for the establishment of the Stratford Festival of Canada, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at his and my Grandmother’s family ancestral home, Annaghmakerrig, near Newbliss in County Monaghan, Ireland. Inspired by advice from my Grandparents and after he had visited Yaddo in Saratoga Spring in New York with my Mother and PL Travers, author of the Mary Poppins books, he left the family home at Annaghmakerrig to the State so that it could be used as a retreat for writers, artists, poets, dancers, composers etc. We were up there this summer. I’d like to spend time there again when I'm writing my second book. My first book is called Bodacious The Shepherd Cat and the second one will be about Inca, “The World's Smallest Sheep Dog”.
On living life as it comes
I'm a farmer, a photographer, a writer …I’m a woman. I never envisaged myself being anything in particular. I love working in the woods and fields, I love working with sheep, breaking and training horses. I love lambing time even though the sleep is non-existent and the hours are crazy! My life has been a very organic life so far in that it has evolved as I have lived it. I went to agricultural school in Vermont, then I worked in upstate New York breaking and training Morgan horses. I came back to Ireland to work on farms during lambing time in Wicklow and Carlow, I also worked at the Wexford Opera Festival. Then I went back to the US where I was acting, writing, modelling, directing, as well as tending bar and waiting tables. Then on to London working as an actor, a beard and moustache knotter for film and TV, and I also worked at small animal veterinary practice and a wildlife charity which took me out to South East Asia. I lived life as it came.
On being in touch with the real world of life and death
When you work on a farm you should be working with nature and nature is all about life and death. I think culturally, when you are in a rich country you are able to distance yourself from death and that is a reality that everyone has to go through, everything dies in the end. If you farm with nature you're essentially working with life’s cycle which is birth, life and death all the time. You have to understand that when you want good soil it needs to have an incredible amount of life in it, you don't want to poison the life out of it. Grass will die back, it's a form of death but also a form of life because in its death it feeds life into the soil. This is when carbon will go into the soil to produce life for the next years spring, so that's why you have such richness in old meadow and woodland soils.
On technology and social media
My small business wouldn't be where it is at the moment without social media. It means I've made a living on a small acreage. It allowed me to stop teaching photography, write my book and grow the wool for my woollen blankets. I enjoyed teaching but that carries on through social media where I can talk about food and where your food comes from. I enjoy helping people understand that you can have really great flavour in food. You can grow loads of food which is naturally filled with vitamins and minerals and flavour, while the hydroponic lettuce does not taste all that flavourful. If you plant lettuce in rich soil it's so delicious, full of flavour and sweet! Allow chickens to range freely, to eat grasses, herbs, bugs, seeds and anything they fancy and they will produce delicious full flavoured eggs full of omega 3.
On the meaning of the word ‘Success’
I think one is successful if they are happy with what they are doing and pursuing and can make a living off it. It’s also about having the respect of those whom you respect. Compared to a lot of people I might be considered to be unsuccessful; I don't own my own place, I don't own anything of huge value but next time I'm sick in bed or old and grey and my body is dying and my mind is still going I will have these memories of things that I've done and accomplished rather than a car or a house or a material thing and I also have the memory of the smells and tastes and experiences whether they were in South East Asia, France, England, the US or here in Ireland.
To find out more about Suzanna’s work, visit her website here. or follow @zwartblesireland on instagram and @1CatShepherd (Bodacious), @WSheepDog (Inca) and @ZwartblesIE on Twitter
