| Project Title: | Am Dér Gréne (I am shining tear of sun) |
| Location: | The National Concert Hall, Dublin, Ireland. |
| Date: | 24th July 2025. |
Artist Statement
My artistic practice has encompassed moving image and sound phenomena and deals with how these mediums inform one another. The work is in constant dialogue with the film language and specifically the characteristics of Slow Cinema; static camera positions, long takes and ambient sound to create a meditative stillness that I disturb and disrupt with found and recorded sounds.
The work aims to develop new narratives around points and planes of intersection between a variety of resources, a collection of experiences, and connections—my body’s connection to the audiovisual technology, my connection to my own lived experience and others’ experiences, my connection to landscape, history, language and storytelling—are all essential to my practice.
Intergenerational narratives are significant to my work, and as a parent, my two sons, Sam and Daniel, occasionally (and not always willingly) collaborate with me to create sound phenomena with a very innocent and playful feel in KORG electronic compositions, voice-over narration, piano, and Sonic Pi live coding.
Contextual Statement
Am Dér Gréne is a 2025 collaborative film work consisting of three films with three collaborators, shot on location in Dublin, West Cork, and The Burren, Ireland. The footage was edited with electronic musical elements composed by my 12-year-old son, Sam Leigh, using Sonic Pi, along with ambient sound sourced from the BBC Sound Effects archive. The film was installed at the National Concert Hall, Ireland, for a single screening event on July 24th, 2025. Sound artist David Donohoe collaborated with a solo improvised sound work, engaging with ideas of improvised sound as material gesture and presence—offering points of connection and punctuation across the three-film structure.
The film’s title, Am Dér Gréne ( I am shining tear of sun ), is the sixth line from The Song of Amergin, an incantation attributed to the chief poet of the Milesians in the Irish Mythological Cycle. Considered the first poem in the Irish language, it functions as a cosmological utterance. Through his words, Amergin conjures a vision of the world he intends to shape upon arriving in Ireland—establishing an entanglement of all things across time and space. The film aims to engage with this idea of entanglement with its collaborators;
Firuca Puscas, a cleaner from Bistrița, Romania, sings a folk song while footage of the Beara Peninsula in West Cork unfolds. The camera tracks along telegraph lines slicing through the landscape—creating an image of past and present interwoven.
Tomy Pius, a dancer from Kerala, India, moves through a modern college building. The location sound is removed and replaced with ambient sounds from Kerala, merged with Sam’s Sonic Pi compositions. The effect is displacing yet intimate, collapsing geographical and temporal boundaries.
Carlos Silva, a student from Minas Gerais, Brazil, sings in Portuguese words attributed to Edmund Ludlow, a Cromwellian lieutenant general in Ireland (c. 1651). He reflects on the significance of The Burren, a 350-million-year-old limestone landscape. It is the only place in the world where Arctic and Mediterranean plants grow together—layering the film with ancestral and geological memory.
The complete work (30 minutes 30 seconds) 4K DCI Single Channel Video was also published online @ www.kennyleigh.com and available to view below: