There is something both ancient and shamanistic about Veronica Steele. When the filmmaker David Shaw-Smith made a splendid television programme about Milleens cheese back in the late 1970's, he chose to shoot the film of Veronica Steele making cheese as if she were appearing in a Vermeer painting, the camera slightly low, the light coming into her face from the window, her back bent as she worked – Girl with Milleens Cheese. She is the kind of woman who might nip upstairs in the farmhouse to play you a fugue she has just finished, as if you were in Cothen in 1722 and J.S. Bach wanted you to drop by and give your opinion of his latest piece.She seems to operate in a different time and yet she seems, like any great artist, to make time her own, which is why we use the terms “ancient” and “shamanistic”: she has a power.
Milleens is not just a farmhouse cheese, it is a totem to creativity, and to the stubbornness needed in order to fashion art, at whatever time it is made, time's present, or time's past. There should be a statue celebrating her achievement, and a university chair, but when that chair is fashioned in University College, Cork, don't put it into the Department of Dairy Science. It belongs in the Department of Philosophy.
Photograph by Stefan Syrowatka www.syro.net