Kavanagh Weekend 2025

Kavanagh Weekend is an arts and literary festival that takes place every September in Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan. The festival identity celebrates the poet Patrick Kavanagh, while taking into consideration its distinctive location and common poetry themes such as the labour-intensive frustrations of farming stony drumlins, while celebrating the ordinary.

An atmospheric visual and audio expression frames all the online and offline strands of the festival's communications. Inspired by his renowned poem Stony Grey Soil, a 20 second looping animation explores the nature and substance of the land Kavanagh describes. It starts in near darkness on a shape that could be any dark hill in South Monaghan. We zoom out to see that it is not a drumlin or field, but a single stone.

The stone rises up and breaks apart in clods, fragments and dust that rise into the air. After becoming completely undone, the rock stubbornly returns to its original form, constraining us back to the ground. 

An ambient soundscape with a paired-back and stark feel was composed to complement the animation.

A digital backdrop with limited intermittent movement of the suspended soil and stones was created for the events, while a series of stills from the animation form an interesting visual background to all the online and offline touch points of the festival communications.