Galway Arts Centre
47 Dominick St Lower, Galway H91 X0AP
2-17 November 2024
Mon-Sat 10-5pm | Sun 12-5pm
John Carson
Temporary Services
Half Letter Press
Breakdown Break Down Press
Michael Holly
Lily Van Oost
John Carson
A collection of artworks by John Carson, spanning over five decades of his practice, feature throughout TULCA. From his life in Belfast in the 1970s, before years spent in Los Angeles, London and today Pittsburgh, Carson’s enthusiastic endeavours appear as a form of storytelling peppered with insightful wit and humour.
In Carson Street, a new 2024 video debuted at TULCA, he investigates why one of the main thoroughfares in Pittsburgh, where he now lives, bears his surname. Describing his piece as a mockumentary, his enquiries find him engaging in kerbside conversations, visits with local residents and businesses, then exploring historical archives, consulting experts, and eventually departing for Philadelphia to pursue a promising lead, one inevitably associated with and entangled into colonial structures of place and its people.
Temporary Services / Half Letter Press / Breakdown Break Down Press
A presentation of several dozen books and assorted printed matter, placed on bookshelves borrowed from Galway City Library, explore the activities of Marc Fisher and Brett Bloom. Both cofounders of Temporary Services in Chicago in 1998, the initiative explores potential for creating new networks, encounters and social interaction, with a keen focus on DIY publishing that can undermine conventional politics of art. Charting the representation and role of artists in the public realm, questioning exhibition models, and the sustainability of publishing are some key themes in this continuing venture. In 2006’s seminal ‘Against Competition’, Fisher foresaw the rise of collaborative artist practice as seen in many places today, dispelling ‘the pervasive and corrosive problem of competition that exists and is created between artists by a market-driven art system’.
Fisher and Bloom have branched out into more adventures. Half Letter Press acts as a publishing imprint and online store, with a particular remit to supporting people and projects that have had difficulty finding financial and promotional assistance through mainstream commercial channels. Fisher’s Public Collectors has since 2007 encouraged greater access and scholarship for marginal cultural materials, founded upon the concern that there are many types of cultural artefacts that public libraries, museums and other institutions and archives either do not collect or do not make freely accessible. Bloom’s Breakdown Break Down press focuses on ecological issues.
Michael Holly
Holly’s presence at TULCA weaves in and out of fellow artists in the exhibition, offering insights into their creative paths and intrinsic relationships to landscape and nature. Holly follows Seanie Barron collecting timber in the Limerick countryside, to be transformed into walking sticks. In one scene, Barron turns to the camera with a piece of knotted wood and proclaims its likeliness to a faraway galaxy. Lily of the Valley, realised in collaboration with Mieke Vanmechelen, digs deep into the memories, documents and artworks that today remain of Lily Van Oost’s legacy, including the archival unearthing of her Brian Boru’s Coat, a gift she made to the National Museum of Ireland after receiving Irish citizenship in 1986.
Lily Van Oost
After relocating from Antwerp to Ireland in the 1970s, artist Lily Van Oost (1932–97) worked from a cottage studio nestled into the remote Black Valley in Kerry. For several decades she produced an esoteric and extensive body of artworks evoking the intrinsic relationship between feminism, inhabitation and nature. Considered a provocateur of both Irish society and its art scene, she once proposed knitting a straightjacket for Margaret Thatcher.
Various contributions to her legacy are presented at Galway Art Centre, where she once exhibited in 1995. A selection of drawings, documents and photographs from the collection of poet and writer Grace Wells feature. She came to live with Van Oost in the early 1990s after seeing a man in London wearing one of her weaved coats, which Wells remembers as a ‘web of three-dimensional appendages that might have been mountains or running water or human forms - into the fabric of that coat she sewed the bleat of sheep, and the sound of the wind blown over black lakes.’ Brian Bowler loans a large textile work, featuring a self-portrait of Van Oost. Michael Holly and Mieke Vanmechelen’s film Lily of the Valley narrates Van Oost’s feminist and environmental beliefs, while a selection of 35mm analogue slides from her contribution to the seminal Women Artists Action Group (WAAG) have been digitally restored and presented, courtesy of the National Irish Visual Arts Library, NIVAL.
Artworks and documents courtesy of Brian Bowler; Michael Holly & Mieke Vanmechelen; National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL), NCAD, Dublin; Grace Wells.
Image: Film still from Lily of the Valley, Michael Holly
Video edit: Jonathan sammon
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
Galway Arts Centre
Accessible venue (ground floor only)
Accessible toilets
Seating provided
Accessible parking (located outside Rouge Café)