KinShip Art Project Statement

“Understanding our role as ‘kin’, we are concerned with redressing the fissures in our society’s relationship with nature. The history and contemporary context of Tramore Valley Park is the ideal location to do this. We look forward to working alongside our kin creatively and exploring together all the positive potential for connection in the aerial, the grounded and the subterranean.”  -LennonTaylor 2021

The KinShip Project is a durational public artwork at Tramore Valley Park by artists Marilyn Lennon and Sean Taylor in partnership with Cork City Council and funded by Creative Ireland. Both Marilyn and Sean’s respective practices are rooted in space and place with a strong emphasis on collaboration. Other project partners include Cork Nature Network, Cork Healthy Cities, MTU, UCC, UNESCO Cork Learning Cities.

Tramore Valley Park was opened as a public park in 2019 on land reclaimed from the old Kinsale Road Landfill site - a former municipal solid waste /non-hazardous industrial waste disposal facility of approximately 72 hectares. Landfilling at the site ceased in 2009. The Park still includes a Civic Amenity Site and a Landfill Gas Combustion plant which functions as an on-site energy generator. The site occupies a large expanse of low-lying peat bog, bounded to the north and east by the Trabeg River, to the west by the South City Link Road and on the south by the Tramore River and South Ring Road. 

Conceived by Lennon-Taylor, The KinShip Project is currently developing a variety of socially engaged cultural initiatives at the park over an initial period of 15 months. The overall aim of the Kinship Project is to develop a real sense of connection between the community and its park. This kin-like connection is a civic goal, to encourage people to treat the park like part of their wider family. 

This is being achieved through; a programme of artist residencies (KinShip Artist Placements); the co-building of an architecturally designed sustainable ‘KinShip EcoLab’ structure; creative and knowledge exchange activities, all of which are centred on the agency of public participants (citizen led Becoming Kin events). All these elements will put the local community at the centre of the project.

In the artists' own project for the park (The Midden Chronicles), Lennon Taylor invited public participation in a year-long deep mapping of Tramore Valley Park. Everyday practical activities such as growing, foraging, composting, walking, counting species, beekeeping, planting, repairing, sensing or tracing, are all considered to be forms of contemporary storytelling in the Midden Chronicles.  Through an artistic lens, the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the accepted is challenged.  These new imaginaries are an entanglement of citizen science, public art making and collective action. 

Together with collaborators (Disco Milk) they will create, collect, record, perform, write and visualise a host of newly created encounters between the park, its wider community of life and the people of Cork city.  

The KinShip project is engaging the public in a variety of creative activities that will encourage the awareness of individual and collective responsibility on climate action, prompting behavioural change by focusing on habitat conservation, sustainable waste management and a circular economy in the context of the unique urban environment at Tramore Valley Park.

The KinShip Project is a recipient of the inaugural Creative Climate Action fund, an initiative from the Creative Ireland Programme in collaboration with the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications that supports creative, cultural and artistic projects that build awareness around climate change and empower citizens to make meaningful behavioural transformations. For more details, go to https://www.corkcity.ie/en/kinship/

https://www.creativeireland.gov.ie/en/blog/creative-climate-action-the-kinship-project/

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