A participatory-led research project involving the collection of local knowledge, stories and fieldnames along the townsland border of Creagh, on the edge of Gorey town in County Wexford.

In 2006 the Arts Department of the Wexford Council commissioned Aileen Lambert to develop a project which centred on the townsland of Creagh, on the edge of Gorey town, County Wexford.

The resulting project featured a participatory process involving the collection of local knowledge, stories and fieldnames along the townsland border. The public were invited to join with the artist in exploring the local landscape and articulating a personal experience of place; a process that culminated in the production of The Soft Edge.

The project featured a public walk event which was held on Bank Holiday Monday, 29 October 2007, documentation of which is featured in the artist's book. An essay by artist Eileen Healy, exploring the act of wandering as an engagement with landscape is also featured in the publication, and accompanies photographs and accounts of the landscape in Creagh generated during the course of the project.

See the artist's website

This participatory-led research project culminated in a public walk and a publication called The Soft Edge, which serves as a document and a showcase for the project. The walk was documented extensively using digital photography.

Article in The Independent

Aileen Lambert is a County Wexford based artist whose practice spans video, performance and sound work, as well as participatory public art projects.

Lambert’s video, sound and performance practice is concerned with the relationship the body has to its environment, and represents a claiming of space. Using simple actions, gestures, processes and interventions, she traces her body's presence on the landscape, expressing and documenting a particular space and time. Many works are concerned with a vain attempt to preserve, mark or measure a certain material, activity or process. It is concerned with the futile attempt to hang onto something which is intangible, and uses metaphors such as the voice, breath and shadow to explore archetypal notions of life, death, and the passing of time. Such explorations are rooted in the artist’s innate sensibility and experience of the body in its environment.

Having graduated from the Limerick School of Art and Design in 1997, Lambert became involved in the Real Art Project (RAP), a Limerick based artist-run initiative dedicated to providing opportunities for emerging and established artists. 

Lambert was involved with the coordination of many events and exhibitions such as the Greatest Sound Art Album in the World…..Ever! and Infusion – National Review of Live Art, and was a founder member of the Real Art Projects Contact Studios. Aileen completed an MA in Visual Arts Practices in Dun Laoghaire IADT in January 2007.

Her work has been represented in 7000IS (Egilsstadir, Iceland) Anti Festival of Contemporary Art (Kuopio. Finland), Tract (Cornwall, England), Excursions (Limerick), EV+A (Limerick), COE (Mayo), Tulca (Galway), Éigse (Carlow), Offside Live II (Dublin), Intermedia (Cork), Quadrant (Limerick), and The Castle of Imagination (Poland).

Public Art projects include: Éist, soundworks on CD, a sound map of local places, for Ballymurn, Co. Wexford; and Bóthar, a collection of postcards featuring places relating to the theme of roads in the Clonroche area, Co. Wexford. Both were commissioned by Wexford County Council under the Per Cent for Art Scheme in 2005. Kilnasoolagh – A Place for Birds, an environmental art project was commissioned by Clare County Council Arts Office at Kilnasoolagh, Newmarket-on-Fergus, Co. Clare in 2005.  In 2006 Lambert installed the sound work Clog na Chláir on Scattery Island in the Shannon Estuary, featuring recordings of bells throughout County Clare, a project commissioned by the County Clare Arts Office initiative Ground Up.