Artist Insights: Aine Phillips | 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.

Aine Phillips
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.’

Documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: John Carson | 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.

John Carson
John Carson is a Belfast born artist who has worked in various media to provocatively explore the interface between high and low culture. He has exhibited and performed internationally and has made works for television and radio. He taught at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London UK from 1991 to 2006 and in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh USA from 2006 to 2022. A collection of artworks by Carson, spanning over five decades of his practice, features throughout The Salvage Agency. 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.

At the Galway Tourist Office near the Spanish Arch, his poster- style artwork, I’d Walk From Cork To Larne To See The Forty Shades Of Green, is placed amongst brochures and guide maps, presenting a subtle variation on the famous phrase. Based on a 1959 song by Johnny Cash, Carson journeyed by foot from south to north over fourteen days, photographing the colour green along the way. Instead of the sickly-sweet romance evoked in Cash’s lyrics, Carson’s green pragmatically extends to the colour of industrial buildings, an often-mundane roadside landscape, and the combat trousers of British troops, stationed on the border – all part of Ireland in 1978.

Screened at the Pálás cinema, the video American Medley embodies a tour to fifty locations in the United States famed in popular music – from New York, New York to California Dreaming and more in between.

In Carson Street, a new 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, visiting local residents and businesses, 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.

Documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Catriona Leahy | 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.

Catriona Leahy
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.’

Bog Thing*: Assembly* for the Symbiocene is a 3D-animated scan of surface area of bog from which peat has been mechanically extracted. The resulting image reveals a form that bears uncanny resemblance to an amphitheatre, albeit a broken, fragmented, one. Leahy’s writings correlate these similarities into speculative understanding:

“As an ancient civic space, the amphitheatre was a place of assembly. However, long before the manmade construction of these historic monumental stone formations, these sites for public assembly (or Things as they were known in the early Germanic Period) were landscape-based forums where important community matters were discussed. Over time, Things moved indoors, became more centralised; land surveying and subsequent land-enclosure slowly did away with the commons, which was a central prerequisite for Thing assemblies/Thing parliaments for discussing things-that-matter.

Here, my Bog Thing aims to reimagine our contemporary political forums where policy is proposed, discussed and ratified, as a kind of landscape parliament – one that represents and brings into the fold the other-than-human entities that we share our planet with. Rather than the bog as Terra Nullius – a nobody’s land – can we reimagine the bog as a space for all species, including human – a dynamic great ecology over which no single group or species holds jurisdiction?”

Documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Bryony Dunne | 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.

Bryony Dunne
Bryony Dunne’s recent films and sculptures act as complex mediations on man’s conquest of nature and desire for domination and superiority. Her 2022 feature film, Surrender Your Horns, considers the true story of the smuggling of rhino horns, stolen from Irish and British museums, to be ground down for traditional Eastern medicine and consumed to supposedly enhance masculine virility. In Dunne’s hands, a man undergoes a Kafkaesque metamorphosis into a rhino- headed man, and documentary footage merges with Theatre of the Absurd-style performance.

Her new sculptures, collectively entitled Drifting, were realised during a residency at the European Ceramic Workcentre (EKWC) in The Netherlands in late 2023. Emerging from Topographia Hibernica – an account of the plentiful flora, fauna and barbaric people of Ireland, produced in the year 1188, soon after the Anglo-Norman invasion – a narrative begins to unravel. With the medieval desire to explain everything as a unified system, descriptions in the book believed that the barnacle goose, a bird, was born from the goose barnacle, a crustacean. Both species have visual similarities: the mouth of the crustacean opening and closing could be imagined as a bird’s beak looking for food. Dunne’s sculptures reimagine this correlation, while also transposing this story into a further appearance of goose barnacles. In 2015, thousands of these crustaceans attached themselves onto Elon Musk’s failed SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, as seen when it was recovered from the sea off Cornwall.

Documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Niamh Moriarty | 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.

Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty
Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty are collaborative artists living and working in the North-West of Ireland. They use performance, video, sound installation and storytelling, along with a detailed research process, to convey visions of transience and resistance. Their recent work tests the possibility of creating a new narrative identity for Ireland that will acknowledge our struggles, admit our complicities and build our capacity for solidarity.

A Collection of Disarticulated Bones is a new body of video work, photographs and objects made and combined for TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, curated by Michele Horrigan. This long-term project traverses centres of knowledge in the US, UK and Europe in order to unpick different foundation myths of the Global North: institutional, pop cultural and embodied. A Collection of Disarticulated Bones examines how decisions relating to preservation and presentation of histories can shape national and individual identities, in the context of imperialism, late capitalism, rising ethnonationalism and polarised public debate on both sides of the Atlantic.

This research is supported by Askeaton Contemporary Arts, the Centre for Creative Technologies at University of Galway, Galway Culture Company, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Creative Heartlands, Galway City Museum and the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2024, A Collection of Disarticulated Bones toured to Solas Nua, Washington D.C. and The New Music + Technology Festival at the Moss Arts Centre (Virginia Technical University).

Documentation: Laura Griffin

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

Artist Insights: Stuart Whipps | 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.

Stuart Whipps
Birmingham-based artist Stuart Whipps’ new performance and installation, The Leviathan of Parsonstown, shares its title with the name given to the historic telescope that sits in the ornate grounds of Birr Castle in Offaly. Built in 1845, it remained the largest telescope in the world for seventy-two years, drawing visitors to see the previously unknown spirals of faraway galaxies. Its creation was driven by intense curiosity and the tremendous personal wealth of the wife of its patron, William Parsons. Whipps points out the materials that made one of Ireland’s greatest scientific wonders possible: ‘Parsons saw the potential in using speculum metal, an alloy made from copper and tin, as the material for the reflective mirror – in order to learn about the stars above our heads, we must first extract metals from the rocks and mud that sit beneath our feet.’

Continued research for Whipps has led to the James Mitchell Geology Museum, founded in 1852 at the University of Galway with thousands of rock, mineral, and fossil specimens, along with the remains of a larger natural history museum once on campus. Still appearing as a nineteenth- century room with few modern updates, it is referred to by many as a ‘museum of a museum’. Given full access to the collection throughout 2024, Whipps has worked closely with the site, artefacts and the generosity, endless knowledge and enthusiasm of curator John Murray, teasing out a new performance artwork and a subtle rearrangement of objects and labelling in the museum.

Video documentation: Laura Griffin