Artist Insights: Julie Morrissy | TULCA 2024
Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.
Julie Morrissy
Julie Morrissy is an Irish poet, academic, critic, and activist. Morrissy’s poetry-artworks have been exhibited at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, the Museum of Literature Ireland, and acquired for the Ireland State Art Collection. Her first collection Where, the Mile End (2019) is published by Book*hug (Canada) and tall-lighthouse (UK). Her awards include the Holy Show Absolutely Anywhere Residency, MAKE Theatre Residency Award, the ‘Next Generation’ Artist Award and Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland. She was a contributing participant in playwriting at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference 2022. She hosts a sporadic reading series in her home called Pizza Poetry Pub, which has featured international and local writers Dionne Irving, sam sax, Erin Robinsong, Ronan Kelly, and Eamon McGuinness. She is a regular a critic for Poetry Ireland Review and Books Ireland Magazine.
Disappearing Acts is a story-telling circle led by poet Julie Morrissy, drawing on collective cultures of myth, storytelling, and faith healing in Ireland. Participants will be invited to share their own stories and experiences and/or intergenerational stories passed down to them. Following from the engagement with law in her practice, Morrissy will link these ideas to Article 45 of Bunreacht na hÉireann/The Irish Constitution, the only article that is non-enforceable and therefore has no legal teeth. Article 45 sets out the principles of social policy, carrying remnants of pre-independence values around care, agency, collective responsibility and protection, which perhaps vanished into the legal frameworks of the Irish State. Morrissy will lead the circle, bringing together participants’ stories and inputs to explore how the legal text of Article 45 engages with the legacies of myth and healing, while considering how those ideas manifest (or not) in Ireland’s contemporary laws and culture.
Documentation: Laura Griffin
