Printworks Gallery
15 Market Street, Galway H91 TCX3
1-17 November 2024
Mon-Sun 12-6pm (Thurs 12-8pm)
Seanie Barron
David Beattie
Peter Fend & Finn Van Gelderen
Michael Holly
Catriona Leahy
Aine Phillips
Niamh Schmidtke
For decades, Seanie Barron has carved and shaped wood in a workshop at the rear of his house on Plunkett Road in Askeaton town. His creations, made with basic hand tools and an intuitive approach, are borne out of his understanding of nature and often-humorous interpretations of the environment around him. He roams around rural Limerick, looking for branches to shape into walking sticks that take on surreal forms. Many can be used as whistles, or incorporate found objects such as coins, nuts, bullets or animal bones. Driftwood morphs into talismanic sculptures who accompany him on his creative journey.
Michael Holly’s videos at TULCA weave in and out of fellow artists in the exhibition, offering an insight into their creative paths and intrinsic relationships to landscape and nature. In 2021, Holly followed Barron collecting timber to be transformed into walking sticks. In one scene, Barron turns to the camera with a piece of knotted wood and joyously proclaims its likeness to a faraway galaxy. More of Seanie Barron’s artworks can be seen at Freeney’s Fishing Tackle Shop on High Street, and all walking sticks are for sale.
David Beattie’s Shifting Forms is an exploration in the use of mimicry in the ongoing development and pursuit of artificial intelligence, seen with an ultra violet fly zapper, robotic vacuum cleaner and collection of carnivorous plants together in a domestic mise-en-scène of Beattie’s making.
Remnants is an interactive artwork that examines mythology, folklore and oral history in the age of digital reproduction and algorithmic narratives - Beattie conducted extensive fieldwork around sites of ancient ritual at Grange stone circle in Limerick.
In navigating the resulting 3D digital scan, an accompanying story about the site generated by AI continually interrupts, resets and changes, seemingly unable to grasp the extent and richness of the world we live in.
Peter Fend and Ocean Earth have for almost five decades proposed speculative and visionary ecological projects that rethink the relationships between art, power and the planet. Throughout the globe and often acting like a travelling salesman of sorts, Fend has constantly advocated that a new kind of geographical ‘reform’ needs to occur - removing existing administrative and country borders and instead consolidate territories solely in terms of the shape of individual water basins. In the case of Ireland, each river from its source to mouth would become their own individual fiefdom, linking locality closer to the flow of water as a nurturing force and creating more environmental resilience.
Fend and Ocean Earth featured as part of ARC, a public art programme in Dublin in 2003, organised by Jenny Haughton and seminal public art agency Artworking, and realised as part of percent-for-art funding for Dublin’s new waste water treatment plant on the East Wall. Filmmaker Finn van Gelderen accompanied Fend during the commission, and an excerpt of the resulting film is presented alongside various documents from that time.
Catriona Leahy’s digital animation and photographic lightbox series continues her ongoing investigations into the degradation of bogs of the Irish Midlands. State-sponsored strip mining, or ‘peat harvesting’ as it was commonly known in Ireland until the recent cessation of decades of operation, has left behind a post-industrial landscape, and Leahy is one of many contemporary artists in Ireland drawn to its complexities and potential for regenerative thought. Reflecting in a recent interview with Marc O’Sullivan in The Irish Examiner, she writes that she has come to think of the bog as ‘a huge archive, a repository of memory. It harbours a lot of mythologies and histories and traumas, of our own colonial past, and the tensions that arise out of that.’
Internationally known for four decades of performance and video artwork that constantly challenge the patriarchal structures of society, Áine Phillips’ video and sculpture installation The Secret is modest in its appearance; on a gallery floor, a small monitor is found lying on its back inside a cardboard box, with packaging placed in its vicinity.
Inside, a short silent video records a secluded road behind Dublin’s giant IKEA superstore, where discarded furniture and junk are seen in the shadow of the retail giant. Phillips notes of the scene, ‘This is the concealed and hidden secret of the consumers promise: the brief life span of our material lives. Our dreams turn to dust. Everything returns to the earth.’
Niamh Schmidtke explores the political and moral complications of ‘being green,’ asking what kind of voices might rise from listening and speaking to today’s ecological impasse.
Drafting communication, drafting climate, drafting futures is a fictional email exchange between the wind, represented as Aos Sí (the supernatural race in Celtic mythology considered true spirits of nature) and a multinational corporation of Schmidtke’s making, the Green Department of Protections. The pros and cons of constructing a wind farm on Draftia, a windy country at the edge of the continent, bare a resemblance to the literary genre of magic realism, as made popular by authors such as Italo Calvino.
Yet, Schmidtke notes that Drafting Communication... mimics email correspondence and policy they researched while on an artist residency at the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg.
‘X’ Mapping, a large floor sculpture, portrays a future human settlement set off the Irish coastline. Taking available data sets of CO2 emissions from government statistics offices in Ireland and the UK since the 1990s, Schmidtke configured each into graph-like ceramic shapes, before placing them as a landscape that replicates the dioramas of city planners, or even architectural fantasy.
Image: Installation shot of Printworks Gallery, TULCA 2024. Photo: Ros Kavanagh
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The Salvage Agency
Curated by Michele Horrigan
1 - 17 November 2024
Galway, Ireland
Access
We aim to ensure that our venues are accessible to all individuals interested in attending. If you have access related questions, please contact info@tulca.ie
Printworks Gallery
Accessible venue
No toilets
Accessible parking (Market Street)