Filmmaker Flora Kerrigan, born in Cork in 1940, attended Crawford Art College before becoming an active member of the Cork Cine Club in the late 1950s and 1960s. Over eight years, she crafted remarkable animation and live-action shorts on 8mm film, earning international accolades and an airing on RTÉ. The surreal playfulness of her animations belies the painstaking meticulousness of their production, while her live-action films, featuring friends and family, are absurd, comedic, haunting and, most strikingly, explore female sexuality and desire. Many of her live-action films are located on the recognisable streets of Cork city. Speaking to ‘The Cork Examiner’ in 1961, Kerrigan explained that “it takes almost 2,000 cut-outs for a two-minute cartoon … it’s work that requires infinite patience but it is very satisfying and less expensive than ordinary filmmaking.” Kerrigan’s filmmaking life appears to have ended when she moved to London in the late 1960s. However, she pursued a creative life, taking photographs and becoming involved in activism through the Women’s Liberation Movement. She also wrote poetry under the pseudonym Eamer O’Keefe, where some of her earlier themes and her interest in graphics and typography elements were carried through from her filmmaking.
