Artist Fiona Kelly is working with the subterranean as a starting point for investigating the manmade and ecological sub-structures in place. Through archival and onsite research Kelly is producing a number of freestanding structures which hold a visual history of this remediated land-fill site.

Fiona Kelly responded to an open call for artist placement made by lead artist LennonTaylor who offered a curatorial frame for consideration;

Subterranean Encounters: We ask “how do we engage with the ‘underground’ as a very particular spatial context that generates insight and questions that unsettle and confront practices of sub-surface extraction, burial, or dumping?”  The subterranean and the underground are rich sites of provocation and cultural 
imagination.  We invite being with the underground, to investigate, to encounter and imagine the living underworlds of soil, liquids, microbes, worms, bacteria and mycelium networks.

This artwork is the result of research in Tramore Valley Park, and fabricated at Backwater Artist Group, Cork Printmakers and the National Sculpture Factory. Three works examine the three key elements of the fabric of the central mound, waste, methane & leachate liquids. The site of the old landfill at TVP produces useful outputs due to its subterranean engineered network of pipes stifling off usable methane gas and leachate liquid, it is a site where waste, an unfiltered conglomerate of metals, domestic waste including electronics, foodstuffs and non-hazardous industrial waste.

This disposal facility, of approximately 72 hectares was made to look new; covered completely by washed aggregates, a rubber membrane and earth, where biological life was cultivated by humanistic intervention.