2020 - ongoing
PLoT
The People’s Land Trust (PLoT) is an artist-led social practice project exploring future imaginaries of urban land use, commons, and stewardship in Cork city. Operating on a speculative horizon of 200 years, the project creates conditions for collective imagination and ethical reflection on how land might be understood, cared for, and governed beyond the present moment.
PLoT functions as a discursive and pedagogical platform, using artistic, collective, and speculative methodologies to make alternative, community-led land futures thinkable and experientially grounded. Through public interventions and temporary learning structures, the project explores how shared responsibilities for land can be articulated, visualised, and rehearsed. Billboards, summer school gatherings, and mobile wooden handcarts act as tools for collective reflection on land, ecology, social relations, and interspecies inhabitation as interconnected systems shaping urban life.
The project investigates alternative models of land stewardship and shared responsibility, including community-led approaches to land holding and governance, asking how land might be cared for and managed beyond purely private or speculative frameworks and across long-term, intergenerational timeframes.
The mobile handcarts now operate as a (Mobile) Commons and community resource, supporting workshops, events, and informal gatherings that explore questions of shared use, land, water, air, and ecology. Digital laser-cut plans for the handcarts are openly available under a Creative Commons licence, enabling others to adapt the structures within their own contexts. PLoT (Mobile) Commons is currently in residence at Tramore Valley Park, Cork City, in partnership with KinShip Eco Lab.
Founded in 2019, PLoT is a collaborative project with artists Marilyn Lennon, Colette Lewis, and Elinor Rivers.
Future, Land, Commons
Public Billboards
(Triptych digital prints 40"x30")
Cork City Northside
2020
FUTURE, LAND, COMMONS was a series of three public billboards installed across Cork City’s Northside. The billboards functioned as speculative prompts, inserting the language of future land commons into everyday urban space.
The billboards posed open questions:
How might communities imagine shared futures of land care, stewardship, and collective responsibility in the city?
As public provocations, the billboards operated at the level of imagination and discourse, seeding conversation and reflection within the community.
PLoT Radical Summer School
Cork City Northside, 2021
The PLoT Radical Summer School was a temporary, experimental initiative created as a space for collective inquiry into the future of urban land use. Taking place under the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic, it combined outdoor gatherings with informal learning formats, emphasising adaptability and provisionality.
Participants were residents of Cork City’s Northside who shared an interest in the city’s future development. The school brought them together as contributors to a collaborative process of learning, discussion, and speculative thinking.
Central to the school was a DIY ethos. PLoT designed and built three wooden mobile handcarts, which served both as pedagogical tools and provisional structures for gathering. These handcarts acted as mobile sites for discussion, reflection, and speculative mapping, supporting conversations and creative strategies around land, climate, ethics, community values, and shared futures. The summer school prioritised process and learning, creating conditions for participants to think collectively about long-term urban land futures.
Artefacts from the summer school, including the handcarts, were publicly displayed at Hollyhill Library providing a material trace of the project’s exploratory and propositional nature and public engagement events.
The project is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and Cork City Council Arts Office. It is a Cork City Partnership and Cork City Libraries supported project with additional production support from Sirius Arts Centre.
