Collaborative Film Artwork by Filmmaker Dervla Baker, Visual Artist Marilyn Lennon, and Sound Artist Andy Ingamells.

Film Contributors and Performers - Oluwakemi Bamidele, Dervla Baker, Alan Brown, Louise Clark, Kathy Cronin, Saidbh Duka, Fiona Groves Raines, Caroline Heskin, Carita Holm, Andy Ingamells, Ruta Ivanauskaite Little, Marilyn Lennon, Seán Looney, Jazz O’Connell, Lisa O’Sullivan, Patrick Penney, Lara Quinn, Ailbhe ReillyTuite

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Calling the Bird Ancestors

2025

Duration - 7mins

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The film responds to a series of intensive workshops, inviting both professional and student artists, to experiment with performance, sound, and visual language. Out of this process, the workshops developed a large-scale, long-form performance at the KinShip EcoLab in Tramore ValleyPark, a municipal remediated landfill site. Both the performance and the film are linked through a common ethos: to work collaboratively, to open spaces of exchange, and to imagine art as a communal act of making and thinking. The original performance was inspired by call-and-response rituals, Indigenous ways of thinking, and the writing of Irish philosopher John Moriarty. It sought to invoke the presence of ancestral species, not as metaphor but as active participants in the creative act, calling on their support for the urgent task of resisting biodiversity loss. In this way, these works become both an artwork and a ritual gesture, an act of kinship that recognises interconnection across species, time, and place.

Through this film work, Baker, Lennon, and Ingamells continue to explore how art can sustain collective resilience, nurture imagination, and foster kinship in the face of ecological precarity.

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^{This project in partnership with the KinShip public art project, is an MTU, TLU Teaching & Learning Development Funded project sponsored by the Teaching and Learning Unit, Office of the Vice President Academic Affairs & Registrar, in partnership with the Department of Fine Art and Applied Art and the Department of Musicianship & Academic Studies.} 

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