The KinShip Artist Placements are aimed at opening up new perspectives, ways of inhabiting the park's ecosystem and generating wider public conversation on climate action, ecology, waste and kinship with the wider community of life.
The KinShip Artist Placement 2022 Award aims to provide opportunities for artists to respond to climate-action concerns within the context of The KinShip Project. It supports activities that take place onsite at Tramore Valley Park and are participatory in nature.
Applicants can apply with a proposal in response to the curatorial brief below to kinshipapplications@gmail.com
KinShipArtistPlacementAugustOpenCall.docx
The following supports will be made available to selected artists:
Lennon Taylor are creating a series of both invited and open submission short Artists' Placements in 2022. This Open Call is an opportunity to make proposals to the artist/curators. Applicants are invited to consider the complex ecologies of the park and to generate new ways of being on site, framed using three nodes for park/person encounters:
Subterranean Encounters:
We ask “how do we engage with the ‘underground’ as a very particular spatial context that generates insight and questions that unsettle and confront practices of sub-surface extraction, burial, or dumping?” The subterranean and the underground are rich sites of provocation and cultural imagination. We invite being with the underground, to investigate, to encounter and imagine the living underworlds of soil, liquids, microbes, worms, bacteria and mycelium networks.
Grounded Encounters:
We ask how do we engage with the ground as a spatial context on which we build our habitats and communities? We share this ground with the broader community of life growing, inhabiting, breathing, and shaping. We invite being with the ground in a reciprocal capacity, to encounter, to listen, to remediate, to co-create.
Aerial Encounters:
We ask how do we engage with the aerial, the overground space of weather, flight, molecules of scent, territorial birdsong, broadcast signals, surveillance, and power? How do we develop an enhanced awareness of our co-existence with the airborne, vaporous, and atmospheric wider community of life over ground? We invite being with the aerial, to investigate, to encounter and imagine.
Learn about past and upcoming artists on placement at Tramore Valley Park below:
Artist Chelsea Canavan is collaborating with Tramore Valley Park’s communities and individuals in the co-creation and experimentation with flags and their rituals. These explorations will respond to the space, multi-species inhabitants, and the decolonisation of the flag as a metaphor for re-thinking historic land ownership and waste management.
Design and making workshops will be held at Tramore Valley Park throughout March, April and early May. There will be a broad variety of entry and access workshops for the co-creation process as the voice of this project aims to be as inclusive as possible to the communities and individuals living in the area. These will take the form (but are not limited) to: online and digital engagement, in-person engagement, downloadable materials to respond to, and postal engagement.
If you or your group / school / project are interested in participating in any format, please get in touch through email: flag.lab.kinship@gmail.com
Information will also be posted on instagram and social media through @kinshipcork
Judy Kravis and Peter Morgan
Writer and Artist
Everyone is happy to talk in a park. There’s freedom in talking to strangers, in the open air. There has been a drought of conversation the past few years. Like swimming and riding a bike, you don’t forget how to do it. As longterm producers of books we are interested in not producing anything except thoughts in people's heads, which may be forgotten two minutes later or may be remembered for years.
For more on the project, please go to www.roadbooks.ie/projects
Writer Judy Kravis and artist Peter Morgan have been working collaboratively for over thirty years, with a particular focus on books, published by Road Books. They manage an eco-project on their land where they have established native woodland, created a large pond, restored meadowland and habitats. In the past few years they have started an artist’s residency, with an emphasis on the interdependence of creative work and the work of the land.
Judy Kravis gardens, writes, interviews the dead as well as the living, blogs about the books she reads, and keeps a longterm diary. Her writing is experimental, poetic, rooted in her extensive reading, her diary, the energies of the classical music she listens to and the garden she looks after. Her most recent book How to talk to the inspector, questions land use and the planning process.
Peter Morgan works with photography, text, moving images and 3-D objects. His approach is humorous, provocative and conceptual. He has exhibited, curated exhibitions, and initiated a new departure for RTE’s Angelus. Recently, working in the woodland, chopping, splitting and stacking, has inspired new artworks. His latest book, I am the messsenger, confronts the climate crisis.
They are both former teachers. Judy Kravis taught French literature in University College Cork for many years, and Peter Morgan taught photography in Limerick School of Art and Design. They now welcome art students and permaculture students to enjoy the land and learn from working in the woodland and the organic vegetable garden. They host art events, exhibitions and performances. They show regularly at small press and artist’s book fairs, and their books are in many collections in Ireland, UK, and Europe.
Colette Lewis
Artist
Long placement, In situ up until – July ‘22
Credit: Maeve Lewis
Colette Lewis is a visual artist whose practice engages with place-based forms of knowledge exchange in the ecological reimagining of urban and rural places. Her work incorporates collaborative actions, public events and installations, filmic and photographic works, and publications. In the past two decades she has produced numerous social art projects and received considerable funding awards for her practice. In 2021 Colette was selected as the inaugural Platform 31 Scheme artist in the Cork City Council area established by the Association of Local Authority Arts Offices. She has an MA in Visual Art Practices from IADT, BA in Fine Art Sculpture from LSAD and a Diploma in Field Ecology from UCC.
For the KinShip Project artist placement her research investigates the creative and regenerative capacity of repair and reuse material culture, the circular and community economy, through collaboration with project partners and public engagement. Informed by the feminist economic thinking of J.K. Gibson-Graham a ‘community economy’ centres around ethical considerations “where our interdependence is recognised and negotiated with other humans, other species, and our environment".
Follow Colette's ongoing research blog, bringing together an array of critical perspectives, community initiatives and artistic approaches reflecting on and re-imagining our complex relationship with waste.
‘Aesthetics and Ontologies of Waste’
Jesse (James) Hallaway
Artist
Short placement, In situ up until – April 17th
Credit: Jesse Hallaway
Artist Jesse Hallaway incorporates plants as agents within a digitized musical system. His Sound Performances search for intelligence in domestic plants and analogue electronics. Utilizing the programming language Max a soundscape is created that can be performed by the electrical impulses from a living organism.
The artworks show new ways of interacting with sound, new connections between organic life and digital hardware, and new sounds from outside the realm of human constructs.
He says “If there is an intelligent message within these systems, we’re listening”.
Jesse is currently in residence in the National Sculpture Factory. He was awarded the graduate show in Lismore castle Arts and shortlisted for the RDS visual art awards. He was featured in the VAI Newsletter May ‘18 edition and has been featured in A5 Art magazine and Average Art magazine. He currently lives and works in Cork city.
Credit: Maeve Lynch
Maeve Lynch is a visual artist and arts worker based in Cork City. Her work is driven by an interest in perception, materiality and structures. Her work is often site responsive and collaborative and is concerned with architecture and landscape as site. She works in a variety of media including printmaking, sculpture, installation and audio visual elements.
She has exhibited both nationally and internationally including China and Lithuania. Maeve’s work can be found in both public (OPW) and private collections including the Eli Lilly Print Purchase Prize collection. She has a BA in Fine Art from Crawford College of Art and Design, an MA in Art + Research Collaboration from IADT and a H-Dip in Public Relations from MTU.
Taking a piece of bog oak retrieved from the bog at Tramore Valley Park in the 1990’s as a starting point for the Kinship project artist placement, Lynch will explore the existence of these ancient natural relics within the site of the park.
She will research the material contrasts and ambiguous interplay between the man-made and natural landscape of the site and ideas around the constantly shifting ground.
Credit: Fiona Kelly.
Fiona Kelly makes sculptural objects and printed matter with the aid of her foraged, ever-expanding archive of waste. This archive holds a compendium of debris; its natural and manmade constituents are altered and arranged to narrate human interactions with land and a demarcation of time.
At Tramore Valley Park, Fiona intends to work with the brief of The Subterranean investigating the manmade and ecological structures in place. Within her current practice she has been examining micro structures and minute formations of dust and geologic matter- calcite, limestone and silica. Replicating natural forms to construct pseudo landscapes. The aim of the placement is to research, observe and record the subterranean network of Tramore Valley Park to think of the world beneath can be a method of reimagining our problematic present; countermanding its hasty alterations and instabilities with older, slower stories of making and unmaking.
Kelly’s work can be found in the public collections of the National Gallery of Ireland, the Crawford Art Gallery and the Jyväskylä Art Museum, Finland.
Current shows, images & information can be found on: www.fionakelly.com
Credit: Finn Nichol
Finn Nichol is a recent graduate of the Sculpture & Combined Media Department of Limerick School of Art and Design, where he was awarded LSAD student of the year. He's participated in a number of group exhibitions nationally, including the RDS Visual Art Awards 2021at the RHA Gallery, Dublin, in which he won the prestigious Taylor Art Prize. Nichol’s exhibition history also includes two solo screenings, and he's had work shown in Aberdeen, Barcelona and Tokyo.
Nichol’s practice is a mutli-disciplinary inquiry into storytelling which appraises the absurdity of life in the Anthropocene. Ideas from Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd are brandished to negotiate meaning in a time defined by mass extinctions and man-made climate change. He seeks to construct an alternate set of images for understanding and engaging with such existential ideas.
The work is characterized by cross disciplinary pollination. Sound, animation, painting and sculpture form visions of gothic psychedelia in highly detailed videos while, in mimicry of how stories reoccur across forms in folklore, ideas migrate across songs, illustrations and live performances.
For the Kinship Art Project at Tramore Valley Park, Finn was commissioned to create an animated short film “Still Life’. Finn explains, “In Still Life, the objects encased beneath the earth of Tramore Valley Park become a leaping point to explore the ecological fallout of consumer capitalism.
Climate change is difficult to visualise- encompassing a vast network of complex, relationships between humans and objects. The work compresses these relationships, clarifying them”.
Still Life will receive its world premiere screening this Autumn 2022 (screening details to be announced)