MARILYN LENNON AND SEAN TAYLOR PRESENT AN OVERVIEW OF THEIR DURATIONAL ARTWORK IN TRAMORE VALLEY PARK.
The KinShip project, like the concept it honours, attempts to expand the bounds of social art practice beyond human relationships to include the wider community of life in reciprocal, ethical connections. This durational artwork is situated in Tramore Valley Park – a 170-acre plot of land that, from 1964 to 2009, was used as a municipal landfill for Cork city. The area first opened up as a city park in 2015 before fully opening to the public in 2019. It’s a rich and complex public site that, in its own way, archives the excess of human intervention and consumption. Older Cork residents, who used to send their waste to ‘de dump’, walk over their own refuse histories on a stroll through the park. Either subconsciously or consciously, being in the park, with its ghostly reminders of the past, prompts us to confront our own actions, biases, and role in damaging habitats.
As a public space, Tramore Valley Park is managed by Cork City Council, who are engineering the substructure to support a new biodiverse habitat on top of three million tonnes of historical city waste. In her survey of ecological approaches to climate change and conservation, Emma Marris argues that many ecosystems are heavily altered by human activities and our approach to conservation should adapt to include concrete cities, brownfield, or toxic wastelands.1 For some, the involvement of artists commissioned to undertake a public art project which focuses on climate change in a remediated landfill site, may appear as greenwashing or ‘art washing’ damaged ecosystems. However, this view oversimplifies a highly complex situation that intersects a diverse array of interests, from local authorities to community leaders, multiple life forms, scientists, and engineers, and from people who occupy the park on a daily basis to national policymakers.
At play in the heart of KinShip are processes of creative and dialogical enquiry, and a broad interdisciplinary and collaborative effort to reshape thinking and decolonise our relationship with nature. One of the calls to action Donna Haraway makes in her writing is “staying with the trouble.” She encourages us to resist the temptation to retreat or disengage in the face of environmental crises. Instead, she calls for active participation and collective efforts to mitigate the damage, restore ecological balance, and build sustainable futures.2 This means acknowledging the complexity of the issues at hand and working within that complexity.
In late 2021, in partnership with Cork City Council, we won funding to initiate the project through Creative Ireland’s first Creative Climate Action Fund open call. The project has since engaged with a combination of artists, community groups, engineers, scientists, ecologists, architects, and educational institutes amongst others to confront the legacy of this municipal landfill through overlapping strands of creative enquiry (creativeireland.gov.ie). At the outset, under the funding call, the preferred participation in the work was with the public, but this has proved to be an unhelpful silo.
Leading the process has meant holding continuous dialogue, working consistently with a core working group of representatives in the city, as well as others who enter for shorter periods, to create an emergent and generative public artwork that includes multiple voices, tests, and provocations.
To date, a diverse range of activities and events have taken place as part of the KinShip public programme, including: A talk by Cork Beekeepers Association about the importance of pollinators and their work as beekeepers; The (Waste) Fibre Flows Laboratory, an interdisciplinary space examining our complex relationships with waste material, led by artist Collette Lewis; ‘Laboratory of Land Flags’, an exhibition of co-created flags made by local communities during workshops with artist Chelsea Canavan; Eco-Kite Festival and kitemaking workshop, led by artists Amna Walayat and Kim-Ling Morris; and Staying With the Trouble – a one-day symposium to showcase the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and the input of diverse forms of knowledge in addressing rights of nature and climate action.
We undertook to archive and map all aspects of the KinShip project as this facet is often invisible to those who are outside of a social art process. This documentation, titled ‘The Midden Chronicles’, archives all meetings, conversations, agreements, contestations, small decisions, and larger initiatives. In 2023, drawing on this archive, we created an artefact, The Midden Chronicles Map – a five by eight-metre map highlighting a few short months of the archive. It acts as both an artwork and a momentary reflective snapshot of the multifaceted and complex inter-relational nature of social art practice. The map is an illustration and visual record of the collective and contributory nature of all aspects of the project, and the effort given by all contributors, collaborators, and partners (lennontaylor.ie).
While ‘The Midden Chronicles’ archive contains material and ephemera that document the project, it also subtly reveals sets of values or assumptions, whether about the role of art, community involvement, or even practical discussions – for example, how much an artist or other should be paid. We may become aware through ongoing interactions that collaborators have brought different sets of values to the collaboration that weren’t initially obvious but could subsequently be addressed within the mechanisms of the project. These hidden economic, cultural, or ethical dynamics are revealed through the dialogical process, making the duration of the project not just about a specific context, but also about navigating the complexities of differing values, power relations, and goals within a collaborative framework.
The KinShip Art Project was initiated by LennonTaylor – a collaboration of Marilyn Lennon and Sean Taylor. The artists have worked together for over 15 years and were joint programme leaders of Ireland’s first MA programme in Social Practice and the Creative Environment (MA SPACE), which ran for ten years at Limerick School of Art and Design. In 2023 LennonTaylor received the Public Sector Award from Cork Environmental Forum for their work on the KinShip Project.
lennontaylor.ie
1 Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).
2 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin In The Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016).
