This seems to be the season in which most of the projects initiated through the Credit Union Residencies Programme are ready for harvest - an analogy appropriate to the Bread Matters forum on the weekend of September 16th.

Participants from Ireland, Portugal, Poland and Britain - painters, sculptors, video and performance artists from Nigel Rolfe to Malgorzata Sady - explored an imaginative series of metaphors and transformations: To Share Bread You Do Not Need a Knife, for example, or Eileen O'Sullivan's work on the sound piece Putting Bread on the Table.

Sherkin Island was the scene of an installation and video piece from Ines Amado and island children on the history of bread and its relationships to other cultures. The Skibbereen-based exhibition included Alexandra do Carmo and Alison Knowles, using bread as a topographical profile of the Hudson river. Siún Hanrahan offered bread as a book and Alice Maher's "Bread Tree" was recreated (from a UCC commission in 1987) for the event, which included Abigail O'Brien's study of the sliced pan and the involvement of the Adrigole Women's Group and Beara Women's Network.

Uniting local people and artists, this was a sustained example of how the residencies are meant to work. Elsewhere, the results were as diverse, as unifying and as satisfying.

According to co-ordinator Katherine Atkinson of the arts management group CREATE, it is the process, not the product, which is important. Perhaps this is something the artists should have forgotten. Whatever might be the audience reaction, the scheme has its weak points, as though plans were explored rather than driven, areas where being laid-back and relaxed replace the purposefulness which is the true distinction of the artist.

The Residencies programme has already had some high points - the Mandala of Community Gardens is one, so is FrameWork Films, so is the Boomerang "Crossing Waters and Borders Down Memory Lane" - and there are more to come.

But it may be that the great achievement of the Residencies idea is its ability to embrace so many groupings (among them, pensioners, asylum-seekers, school-children, the unemployed, HIV AIDS sufferers) and communities outside the city in what would otherwise be entirely urban: Newcestown, Midleton, Baile Mhuirne, Mitchelstown, even Cape Clear have all been gathered in through this initiative, for which funding of €180,000 from the local credit unions, city and county councils, Arts Council and Cork 2005 supported 20 individual projects.