AtLantis AtLand

Sherkin Island / Open Ear Festival 2026

AtLantis AtLand was a very special project that took place on Sherkin Island as part of Open Ear Festival 2026. The large-scale, site-specific operatic performance took place on Silver Strand Beach, creating an immersive soundscape that brought together a collective mix of vocals, electronics, costume design, field recordings, improvised sound and experimentation.

Stephanie Lamprea - BTS, Silver Strand (2026)

Inspired by Maya Deren's 1944 experimental film At Land—a dream-like meditation on identity, landscape and the body—this hydrofeminist performance became an immersive art piece where vocals, sirens, songs, landscape and electronic textures merged with the rhythm of the sea and surrounding landscape.

Stephanie Lamprea

The project was a co-creation by soprano and composer Stephanie Lamprea, artist and director Jesse Jones, and composer and electronic musician Alistair MacDonald, with costume design by Alison Conneely and set design by Sara Murphy.

As part of the Sherkin Island Choir, workshops with Jesse, Stephanie and Chris (Open Ear) and Alistair allowed the residents and BAVA students to explore sounds, textures, objects and landscape through active listening and sound-making experimentation that helped us contribute to a performance that held “place” and “community” deeply.

Photography taken of LIVE performance, Sherkin Island, Silver Strand (2026)

The performance took place on Sunday Afternoon at the Festival.  It was an event full of energy, a symposium with the wind and waves and an embrace of collective making. It was a privilege to be a part of, and thank you to everyone who allowed us to participate in the production, with special thanks to Jesse Jones - Extraordinaire.

CREW (2026)

Holding | Exhibition

A collaborative installation created by Mary Callaghan, Emma McNulty, Louise Kiernan, Róisín Ní Chonaill, and Sergey Kior.

Between the familiar and the unknown, a place of sublime wonder, where the unseen forces of nature are comprehended, lies the cliff edge. Each step here needs to be more careful, aware, and intentional. So often our movements are routine, habitual, unthinking. We invite you now to slow down and draw closer to the edge.

The 2026 BAVA Visual Art Degree students present this collaborative exhibition, which explores the experience of human encounter through landscape, language, memory, trace and voice.  Questioning the ability to see the concealed, to feel the unconsidered, and notice the smallest gestures, by creating bodies of work sited on Sherkin Island that speak to one another with rhythms and patterns that we’ve long forgotten.

Within these themes, each artist explores a facet of what it means to “Hold”. Mary Callaghan’s work  + Headland located above Cow Strand, presents five large pieces of sheer material,  positioned as points of collaboration with the wind, rain and sun. A meditative acting painting performance, using the universal language of the line, Mary offers her hand as a corporeal form to begin a dialogue with the elemental forces.

Voice Rewilding by Louise Kiernan, Beyond the Surface by Emma McNulty, MARTS MOTHERS MADNESS by Róisín Ní Chonaill and Sherkin Island at Night by Sergey Kior

Gesture and noticing the un-noticed in the everyday is the focus of Emma McNulty in her work entitled: Beyond the Surface, a site specific work, displayed in Peggy’s House, Farrancoush, using gesture as an exploration of the self within the domestic space, invisible labour, the unseen and the often overlooked acts of service, care and resistance are represented through sculptural casts of the hand, frozen in moments when gesture is beyond language itself.

In Voice Rewilding by Louise Kiernan the connection between language and landscape is explored in an immersive multimedia installation that creates space for the voice to be reclaimed and rewilded. It honours voices and lived experiences of living with stammered speech through a series of oral accounts, the film stages the voices that have often gone unnoticed or unheard. It offers an opportunity to celebrate all voices, to reflect on the power structures that shape them, and to trace the landscapes from which they emerge.

+ Headland by Mary Callaghan

Róisín Ní Chonaill’s  installation, located near Michael’s Farm, presents her film MARTS MOTHERS MADNESS, an exploration of the search for belonging. The work traces a journey of rebirth, rupture, and eventual dispersal within the landscape, unfolding across Sherkin Island and the cattle mart in Skibbereen.  In this moving portrait of interspecies intimacy, Ní Chonaill collaborates closely with cattle as more-than-human participants. Together, they shape a world in which the animal becomes a threshold of care an embodied space where both human and non-human lives are held.

Sergey Kior turns our attention to the unseen in his body of work: Sherkin Island at Night; a series of large scale prints placed in different locations across the Island. Working only at night, after the last ferry leaves, the artist focuses on a time when the island becomes quiet. Using only available light from the moon, street lamps, or passing cars, the images capture moments where familiar places lose their clarity. The photographs are rough and unpolished, with things appearing and disappearing in the dark. Rather than showing the island, the work is about staying with it in this state of opacity.

All artists seek to re-imagine what we have not yet noticed. To give time, space, and pause for openness, connection and reclamation of body and space. To explore lived experience as a continuum of cycles, but one that allows us to slow down, contemplate and be present.  They each approach Holding as a way of listening, sustaining humanness, carrying lineage and resisting forgetting. Across these five artist’s works mapped across Sherkin Island in interior homes, on cliff edges and placed in the environment, hands become vessels, landscapes become keepers, and time itself seems briefly held in suspension, asking what it means to hold and be held within a fragile, shifting  world.  

Voice Rewilding – The Making and Breaking of the “Box”

Voice Rewilding was a project exhibited as part of the fourth-year degree show on Sherkin Island, Ireland in 2026. The project was inspired by the lived experience of stammering. Spanning over two years, with the final exhibition taking place in May 2026. It looked at stammering outside of the medical lens and brought it into a metaphorical context, allowing space for voice and disability to be expanded into new terrains of creative practice.

Voice Rewilding — Sherkin Island

The project took place over two years, documenting oral accounts of people living with stammered speech. It was inspired by my own experience living as a covert stammerer, and the obstacles that we navigate daily in order to manage a stammer. I was also interested in the stammer as a living and breathing presence, one that only shows up when there are people present. In this sense, the stammer has a relational quality; it shifts depending on when and where it appears.

Voice Rewilding – Interior Structure Build

Another part of the project was an interest in the intersection of voice, repetition, sound, and rhythm, and how those textures parallel the landscape. Voice and landscape sit in tandem with one another in their unpredictability and shifting forms.

The textile works were informed by the stories being told and worked in unison with the short film. The interior displayed a stained-glass effect, with light filtering through the textiles and wind moving through the structure and film. Sitting within the space, you became immersed in an installation that was both sensory and bodily in nature.

Voice Rewilding — Interior Structure and Digital Screen

All in all, this body of work encompassed sculpture, textiles, film, and illustration. It was a work in progress where each step informed the next, like a conversation between forms, natural landscapes, and narratives.

The reception and response to the exhibition was amazing, and I’m so thankful to everyone who came out in the sun and rain that weekend. Big thanks also to all the lecturers and TU staff, along with the community of Sherkin Island and everyone along the way. It lashed rain on the Sunday, just in time for de-install.

Next stop – Uillinn.

Finished Structure - Sherkin Island (Richard’s Field) & Tiff (Project Manager)