Outcomes
Outcomes are evolving as installations, a website, kinetic audio-visual works, an art book to document the process of work on streams, a collective exhibition at the Courthouse Gallery in 2026. These works document both tangible ecological interventions such as filter zones, riparian restoration, and wayleave rehabilitation and the intangible relationships fostered through sustained collaborative engagement.
Sruth forms part of a wider inquiry into the role of community-led art in re-storying landscapes. It transforms environmental data into shared dialogue, ecological stewardship into creative practice, and restoration into a living cultural process. Reflecting the ethos of Ground Up Artists’ Collective, the project emphasizes usership over ownership and process over monument, foregrounding the continuous flow between art, action, and the living world.
Collaborators include:
- Feidhlim Harty, FH Water Systems Management
- Veerle Clayes, horticulturalist with a focus on biodiversity
- Joao Martins, water ecologist
- Landowners, farmers, smallholders and stewards of the Lickeen Lake townsland
- Art learners from the College of FET Ennistymon Campus who are volunteering as part of a work experience placement. Also exploring art as social action with Collins.
- The Down to Earth Collective, local environmental education and advocacy group which provides local community engagement for projects such as orchard maintenance, organic food growing and water quality improvement.
- Ground Up Artists’ Collective, brings creative and collaborative energy into rural contexts.
- Clean Lickeen Activist Group
- Wild Earth forest and home-schooling programme
Support:
A Creative Communities Project Award for Maeve Collins and Éilís Murphy to document the process on streams with a community of interest and feed back to the community at Lickeen Lough.
Local Water Authority Programmes for ecological works
Acres Ireland to broaden supports for stakeholders
Professor Tirnan Henry of the Geography Department NUIG and local Jimmy O’Donaghue to source underground springs in lake (and test and consider the algal bloom on the lake)
Ivan Hornak website
Details & Info
Sruth (Flow)
Art and Ecology Project, Maeve Collins (from Ground Up Artists’ Collective) with a broad community of interest.
2025–ongoing
Sruth (the Irish for Flow) is an ongoing art and ecology project coproduced with a community of interest and place that continues Collins’ long-standing exploration of the meeting points between body, water, and belonging. Situated within the catchment of Lickeen Lough- a vital drinking water source for approximately fifteen thousand people- the project reflects on water as a carrier of memory: of rainfall, land use, runoff, and care. Through collaborative engagement, Sruth invites communities to reconsider their relationship with the water systems that sustain them.
The project functions as both ecological restoration and cultural ritual. Working in close collaboration with water specialists, ecologists, landowners, educational institutions, and local community groups, participatory processes are facilitated, including planting and painting, mapping, storytelling, and sound and clay-making. These actions translate scientific knowledge into embodied, sensory experiences. Activities such as water testing or riparian planting become gestures of attentiveness, reinforcing awareness of the interconnectedness between human activity and watershed health.
Influenced by eco-feminist and decolonial perspectives, Collins’ approach positions art as a form of reciprocity rather than representation. Within Sruth, water is understood not as a passive subject but as an active collaborator, responsive, shaping both material outcomes and shared meaning. Through collective acts of noticing and making, participants develop a deeper awareness of their place within broader ecological systems of flow, care, and accountability.
