Mountain edge
Mountain Edge is a site specific, art project with local children, aged 7 - 12 years from The Meadows Estate, Killininny Firhouse.
It is an artistic process with an innovative methodology in which outreach and collaborative research will lead to site specific temporary art in the environment. In it, landscape, history and ecology are woven together. Sophie and the children from The Meadows Estate will activate the open space around their houses and apartments, forming a temporary outdoor “community centre” and, in this way, encourage people of all ages to engage with the landscape and nature that surrounds the houses.
Through a phased series of workshops in July children engaged with invited artists, including Martin Cahill and Lauren Haughey, explored the flora and fauna of the area with Entomologist Bernie Roche, conducted their own research into the setting, made artworks and constructed life-sized but temporary and environmentally-conscious additions to the site. The work they undertook will culminate in a one-day art festival for the wider community in September 2024. The children will create micro- spaces, vistas and physical and psychological access routes and landmarks, giving their immediate environment a unique identity and atmosphere.
Gallery
Sophie von Maltzan Biography
Sophie von Maltzan is an artist, academic, landscape architect, activist and farmer. She works mainly in the field of environmental, socially engaged and collaborative practice. Her art and education projects are often also research projects which explore and aim to improve the human relationship with the environment. She has developed a variety of collaborative approaches that weave together ecology, participatory and site specific design.
She has over 20 years of practice experience in a range of contexts: she has been commissioned by local authorities, institutions and community groups.
Sophie von Maltzan’s socially engaged and spatial practice focuses on the public realm, often in the urban context. Her projects – usually working with social groups including artists, children, students and local communities – have been investigations into critical spatial practices. Many have taken the form of interventions into ostensibly marginal spaces such as semi-derelict sites in Dublin in the hands of property developers (Art Tunnel Smithfield ) or small neighbourhood parks (St. Annes Road Pocket park ). They combine her skills and interests in socially engaged art practice, reclaiming public space, urban sustainable resilience building, climate crisis mitigation and community organisation. She approaches ‘environment’ not simply as a setting or background for social existence, but as a tool to improve lives. Her working method is situational and action-oriented, with a focus on the collaborative production of space as an open and unbiased process.
Her projects investigate the social and environmental potential of public space, as well as the factors which limit its functioning as ‘real’ spaces of social exchange. Working in site- and context- specific settings with different communities, they explore and challenge the participants’ cultural and aesthetic norms. Her work also focuses on commercial and municipal interests, asking how the city authorities can offer/ allow and encourage grass-roots-up design interventions and, ultimately, what kind of changes can be brought to the lives of the community? In other words, Von Maltzan is deeply interested in how public open space can be a form of agency itself?