Roots in the Sky / Underland

Roots in the Sky is a transdisciplinary collaboration exploring felt connection to land through multiple feedback loops in movement, live drawing, sound, and projected image. The performance is also the creation of a visual art work that remains in the space after the live performance. A collaboration with artists Aoife Hammond and Milo Cummins, this new work forms part of Kate's ongoing practice in embodied approaches to image and movement creation. 

Drawing from personal and collective imagery it reflects on our innate porosity through a rich stream of sonic and visual interplay. Roots in the Sky considers what the land holds for us, from the stones and bóithríns infused with story and myth in Kate's own homeplace in south Sligo to the infinite layers that tie people to place. Roots in the Sky considers the depth of loss through exile, and is an expression of our ongoing call to the land to support us.

"The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree."

Underland brings the explorations to the darker corners of our imagination and to ideas of deep time. The layers of audio and visual feedback loops here reflect layers deep within the earth and within our consciousness. A hand print from 35,000 years ago comes into our present as time folds itself, drawing disparate moments together. This collaboration includes the addition of vocalist and audio describer Emilie Conway and interdisciplinary artist Tara Boath Mooney. 

Underland draws from Robert McFarlane’s book of the same name and explores poetic expression through image, movement, and sound, including audio description, layered with live feedback, of our relationship to all that lays deep below us. A dream-like land where time "thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows", it considers acts of gathering and scattering and our inherent osmotic relationship with ‘other’ and ‘outer’. 

Kate Wilson has a background in visual art and dance. Her practice, based in the north west of Ireland, is trans-disciplinary and collaborative. She has a BA (Hons) from the Slade School of Art and an MA (Distinction) in Creative Practice for Professional Dance Practitioners from Independent Dance & Trinity Laban, London. In 2016, she founded Undercurrent Performance. As well as directing ensemble projects such as Unearth (2022), Earthfall (touring 2026), areas of research include Telling, an exploration of relationships between dance, speech, and Irish Sign Language, and Roots in the Sky, a trans-disciplinary project exploring visual and audio feedback loops. The ensemble project From Here A Bridge (2024) explored immersive sensory introductory performance experience for diverse audiences.

Aoife Hammond is a singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist based between Leitrim and Clare. They work as a session musician and sound artist, creating original electronic and acoustic scores using synthesisers, bouzouki, guitars, mandolin, and voice. Rooted in Irish traditional music and sean-nós singing, Aoife’s repertoire centres on songs of resistance, oral history, and the relationship between land and culture. Their musical practice moves fluidly between tradition and experimentation, with a particular focus on sound as a carrier of memory and grief. Aoife has created soundtracks for film and performance works by Niamh Moriarty, Ruth Clinton, Manal Mahamid, as well as for Undercurrent Performance, Rabbit’s Riot Theatre Company, and theatre makers Gráinnemir Abualrob and Sorcha Fox.

Milo Cummins is a multi-disciplinary artist working in the areas of drawing, painting, video, print, installation, and music. Having completed a BA in Art from IADT in 2021 specializing in film, he has developed a studio practice based at Ard Voltas, Sligo since 2024. His work addresses issues related to the human condition, exploring topics such as climate change and housing as a human right. Alongside his work as a solo artist, he has collaborated with Undercurrent Performance on several projects, contributing video design for performances and research work including From Here A Bridge (2024), Roots in the Sky (2025/2026) and Between Earth and Sky (2026).

Tara Baoth Mooney is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses sound composition, performance, textiles, drawing, and video. She explores ecosystems and their transcendence through various forms, including human experience and interaction with personal and immediate environments. In 2021, Mooney finished an art-based, eco-psychosocial practice-led PhD which focused on the relationship between humans, lived experience, and the non-human elements which surround people within personal eco-systems. 

Tara is a founding member of ‘Áit’ the rural-based art collective in Manorhamilton, Leitrim. She was one of the lead artists in The Leitrim Hawthorn Project and is a founding member of the experimental music group RÚN. She co-created the project Mammary Mountain, an intimate performative VR experience that explores “dis-ease” within the body and land through the experience of breast cancer. This artwork premiered at the 81st Venice Film Festival in 2024 and has toured throughout Europe, Australia and the USA where it won Best of Festival at Filmgate festival in Miami, USA. Tara is a studio holder at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre.

Emilie Conway is an award-winning vocalist, composer, access activist, and consultant, and accredited art psychotherapist based in Dublin, Ireland. Her multifaceted work spans performing arts, disability rights advocacy, multi-sensory experience design, and therapeutic practice—united by a deep dedication to creative expression, social justice, and human connection. As a consultant and advisor, Emilie is engaged by academic and cultural institutions on equality, diversity, inclusion, and human rights implementation including the National Gallery of Ireland, the Arts Council, the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), Open House Dublin, and TU Dublin. 

One of many of her recent interdisciplinary projects is Solid Space Sound: Multi-Sensory Spatial Experiences countering the dominant, ocularcentric (sight-first) bias of cultural spaces. Emilie created Solid Space Sound—a collaborative, multidisciplinary research and design methodology— to centre the richness of blind and visually impaired (VI) sensory perception, using music, movement, touch, tactile language, and creative audio description to map physical and artistic environments.