The Imaginary Castle
16 September 2025
This September, I had the joy of screening a short film co-created with local children, The Imaginary Castle, in Tipperary Excel Cinema 1 as part of the Tipperary Together Festival, organised by Creative Places Tipperary.
This wasn’t just a film, it was the culmination of eight months of collaborative workshops with children during my time as Artist in Residence at Three Drives Family Resource Centre.
Throughout our time together, we explored:
Acting & Improvisation
Writing & Storytelling
Design, Colour & Craft
Cameras & Sound recording
From the beginning, we approached the work through the art of play. Scenes were built from improvisation. The poetic narration script was developed from the conversations, drawings, and ideas that emerged from our sessions. The children were not just participants, they were co-creators, shaping every part of the process.
With minimal props and maximum imagination, we made crowns, masks, and constructed our own magical visual language. A recurring theme that naturally emerged was one of kings, queens, and the idea of home. What does it mean to be royal in your own world? What does it mean to be from this town?
These questions echoed throughout our sessions, grounding our story in a sense of place and identity while allowing it to bloom into something playful, poetic, and surreal.
I had the privilege of writing and directing the piece, but it was truly shaped by the voices and energy of the young people I worked with. Their spontaneity, honesty, and humour gave the film its heart.
Making The Imaginary Castle showed me what happens when children are trusted as artists, and when imagination leads the way. Thank you to the children, families, and the team at Three Drives and Creative Places for making this possible. It has been invaluable to my own practice and has deepened my ongoing exploration of memory, childhood, and the poetics of the everyday. There’s a raw, instinctive truth in how children move through imaginative spaces. Being invited into that world reshaped the way I think about authorship, narrative, and the role of play in making meaning.
