Michele Horrigan; Star Wars Man, by Seanie Barron.
A feast of visual art on display at TULCA Festival
The late Kerry-based Lily van Oost is one of the artists whose work is on display at this year's event.
There is something admirably edgy about Galway’s TULCA Festival of Visual Arts running at this time of year, so close to the usual round of Christmas exhibitions. TULCA 2024 is curated by Michele Horrigan under the title The Salvage Agency, and features contemporary art of all kinds at various venues all over the city, including professional galleries, Galway University and a fishing tackle shop.
Alongside her activities as an artist and curator, Horrigan is the founder and director of Askeaton Contemporary Arts, which promotes residencies and exhibitions in Askeaton, Co Limerick. She is also the editor and publisher of ACA Public, and writes on art for publications such as Bomb Magazine. Her intention for The Salvage Agency was that it should consider the role of art in ecology and the environment.
One of Horrigan’s inspirations is a short story by the late Galway writer Walter Macken. “I had this collection of his called City of Tribes,” she says. “And there was one story called The City that really jumped out at me. It’s written from the perspective of a seagull flying over Galway and encountering different situations, like the bustle of the market in the square, or a drunk falling out of a pub, or conversations happening around the town.
“Nowadays there's a lot of fiction written from a non-human perspective, but this is a text that's 80 years old and is so ahead of its time. I think the story is just as relevant today as when it was written. There’s new high-rises and apartments in Galway now, but a lot of the city is much the same. And I think that, within the exhibition, a lot of the artists are responding to that kind of past as well, to those layers of archaeological or ecological time.”
Another of Horrigan’s inspirations was Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka’s glass models of marine life in the zoology and marine biology museum at the University of Galway. “The Blaschkas were used as an educational tool, predominantly in marine biology departments in the late 19th century. Back then, you couldn't dive deep in the ocean to see marine creatures in real life, so the universities would commission these slightly larger than life-size glass models.
“They're really beautiful, but most people don’t even know they’re there. We’ve arranged for the museum to be open seven days a week for the duration of the TULCA festival. It's a really amazing opportunity to go in and have a look at them.” Horrigan has sited artworks at four locations around the university. Among them is Stephen Brandes’ The Night Garden, a billboard-style structure in the Quad. “The work is Stephen’s response to this very interesting sculpture on the college grounds, a coat of arms that’s got a lion on one side and a unicorn on the other. He’s also inter-splicing images of the questionably stuffed animals in the college’s collection. Stephen can be quite ironic, and in this instance he’s being provocative in the middle of these hallowed grounds.”
Image: Lily Van Oost, title and date unknown. Courtesy of Grace Wells
TULCA has traditionally made use of venues such as Galway Arts Centre and the 126 Artist-run Gallery, as well as the University of Galway. “We’ve also put work in Galway City Museum and Galway Tourist Office,” says Horrigan, “and in among the archaeological remains in the Hall of the Red Earl. But the main space this year is the Printworks Gallery on Market Street. It’s a post-industrial space, an old newspaper printworks that used to belong to the Galway Tribune. There's eight artists in there altogether.”
TULCA has always put out an Open Call for proposals, and this year there were more than 400 submissions. “I took seven or eight artists from that,” says Horrigan. “Some I had already worked with but maybe hadn't considered; they were submitting newer works that I hadn't seen or wasn't familiar with. And then there were some artists whose practice I wasn't familiar with at all, new artists I hadn't heard of. There's a real intergeneration thing as well. There's artists in their 30s, and others well into their 70s.”
Curating TULCA also allowed Horrigan the opportunity to champion artists from the recent past, such as Lily van Oost, the Antwerp artist who settled in the Black Valley in Co Kerry in the 1970s. Van Oost created a series of extraordinary works in textiles before her passing in 1997.
“We've got a loan of this really wonderful original piece of Lily’s from Bowler's Garage in Killarney. She would have got her car fixed there, and it may have been given to the garage in lieu of payment for a repair job. Pretty Polly were based in the Black Valley, producing nylon tights, and Lily would get the leftovers they weren't using. So she used the tights to weave a portrait of herself in a car with a woolly hat on her. It must be from the late 1970s or maybe the early ’80s, and it’s kind of wild.
“The piece sat on the garage floor for years, and it’s absolutely filthy from exhaust fumes. It’s bleached out a bit, and dusty. But you don't want to go at it because that would probably be a big conservation project. I also feel like those layers of time in the garage would be what Lily might have wanted in the show. After TULCA, it's going into the Kerry County Council collection.”
Horrigan also had the pleasure of putting work in unusual venues around the city. The aforementioned fishing tackle shop is Freeney's on High Street, which is also a public house. “It's a really wonderful spot, the likes of which you don't see much anymore,” says Horrigan. “There's a small store attached to the bar where we’ve put a couple of wooden fishing priests by the craftsman Seánie Barron. A priest is something you use when giving the last rites to the fish, is one way of putting it.
“There’s a couple of Seánie’s sticks that you would walk the land with as well. They’re in the window. People might come across these works of his in Freeney’s, and then be encouraged to go on to the main venue where the rest of his pieces are on show, and then on to the other venues around the town. Those chance encounters are what make TULCA so unique.”
Marc O'Sullivan Vallig | Irish Examiner | 11/11/2024