REVIEW: TULCA 2024 | El Putnam | Visual Artists' News Sheet

EL PUTNAM REVIEWS TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS.

This year’s TULCA Festival, curated by Michele Horrigan and titled The Salvage Agency, meets us in our current moment of global instability and uncertainty, mistrust and disillusion, extreme automation and military acceleration, when it can feel nearly impossible to claim any sense of agency. However, the festival assembles a selection of artists who collectively demonstrate a sense of purpose by salvaging the multiplicity of entangled crises and digging into the thickness of time.

A Salvage Agency

The festival title can be read in multiple ways, attesting to the nuance of its meaning. At first, The Salvage Agency sounds like some kind of service that rummages through scrap, in order to determine what can be kept, reused, or restored. One imagines the Baudelairean figure of the ragpicker, tasked with creating order from the hoarded debris of the industrial age.1 In a way, that is what each of the exhibiting artists is trying to do, as they take and make use of linguistic, cultural, or material fragments.

For example, Seanie Barron’s wood carvings present haptic and tacit knowledge of the materials he collects and transforms. Exhibited in the Printworks Gallery and installed among the displays at Freeney’s Fishing Tackle Shop, Barron’s carvings demonstrate a salvaging of spirit, which conjures surrealist visions from wood. Also at the Printworks, Áine Phillips’s sculptural installation and video work, The Secret (2013), depicts a road adjacent to the IKEA superstore in Dublin. Broken bits of furniture, packaging, and other rubbish are strewn along this secluded thoroughfare. There is nothing, it seems, to be salvaged within this detritus; it conceptually underscores both the empty promise of consumerism and the brevity of our material lives.

Regina José Galindo, Tierra, 2013, HD video; still courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.

However, the act of salvaging is not just about recovering physical materials, but a salvaging of humanity, within this milieu. In the University Gallery, Guatemalan artist and poet Regina José Galindo’s video work, Tierra (2013), presents the artist standing nude in a green field, as an earthmoving excavator digs the land around her. She maintains her posture of stillness, as she is eventually left on a small island of earth, in the midst of a decimated landscape. Sometimes, when overwhelmed by external forces – understood, in this instance, as patriarchal and colonial regimes – what is salvaged comes from within our bodies, as one is grounded to the Earth.

Léann Herlihy’s performance-based bus tour, Beyond Survival School Bus (2022), similarly engages interconnections between the body and the landscape. In contrast to Galindo, Herlihy is playful in their evaluation of the power of human relations with nature, delivering a script informed by queer ecology, feminist and abolitionist theory. However, both artists challenge notions of apocalypse as a future event; rather, they suggest, such moments have previously happened and are currently occurring, requiring urgent systematic and structural change.

Áine Phillips, The Secret, 2013, sculpture and video, installation view, Printworks Gallery; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.

The Agency of Salvage

While the festival title alludes to the agency that arises from acts of salvage, the capacity to recover is becoming less feasible amid the extractive practices of late capitalism. Bogland, for example, is a repository of time – both an ancient landscape and an organic, living archive. The industrial strip-mining of bogs for the mass cultivation of fuel during the twentieth century has left stretches of exhausted wasteland in the Irish midlands. In the Printworks Gallery, Catriona Leahy’s Bog Syntax: The (Dis)Order of Things* presents fragmented digital images of bogland, laid out as specimens in an irregular grid. There is a breaking down of visual forms, evocative of peat harvesting – whereby the earth is conceived in terms of its capacity to be exploited – to create a pixelated visual landscape. While salvage within a state of ruin may seem futile, anthropologist Anna Tsing states: “Our first step is to bring back curiousity.”2 Artistic interventions within the festival prompt the curiosity that is necessary to instigate liveliness. In Leahy’s Bog Thing*: Assembly* for Symbiocene, a 3D scan of an eviscerated landscape becomes an ampitheatre that actively invites such speculations.

Seanie Barron, wood carvings, installation view, Printworks Gallery, November 2024; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.

To Salvage Agency

Much like bogland, myths are tales that are carried through time, with the salvaging of these narratives opening new imaginary possibilities. David Beattie’s Remnants (2024) presents a 3D-scan of the Grange Stone Circle, a Bronze Age site in Limerick. The audio track, an AI- generated mythological narrative, is glitched and disrupted, and further manipulated through interactions with the screen. A subtle twist of the 3D object enables the voice to become more distinct, only to be swallowed by noise. The viewer assumes a god-like position, controlling the simulation and its broken algorithmic recounting of oral history across technological epochs.

In Michelle Doyle and Cóilín O’Connell’s Irish language short film, Super Gairdín (2022), screened at Palás Cinema, a middle-aged man inadvertently awakens a vengeful cailleach(divine hag) who has taken the form of a large rock within a garden centre. Mythology in this film does not function as a means of trying to capture a lost history, but the absurd scenario shows the cailleach encountering the limits of a past that cannot be translated into the present. These linguistic limitations do not hinder the capacity of the story to emerge, but resonate with Irish philosopher Richard Kearney’s reflections on mythology as a “catalyst of disruption and difference, a joker in the pack inviting us to free variations of meaning” in order to “challenge and transform the status quo.”3

Most striking about this year’s festival is Horrigan’s assemblage of artists, whose interrogations of landscape, nature, and folklore, as well as colonial and industrial histories, offer a range of aesthetic encounters. Moreover, this iteration of TULCA can also be understood as the ‘salvaging of agency’ in recovering, through artistic provocations and improvisations, our capacity to imagine and actively build alternative futures. The act of producing art itself, then, becomes a means of reclaiming agency, as we learn to exist through and with the wreckage that accumulates.

---

EL Putnam is an artist-philosopher based in Westmeath.

1 See for example Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises (Les Paradis Artificiels, 1860), trans. Stacy Diamond (New York: Citadel Press, 1996).

2 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021) p 6.

3 Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997) p 98.

REVIEW: TULCA 2024 | Bronac Ferran | Studio International

Regina José Galindo, Tierra, 2013. Colour video, with sound, 33 min, 30 sec. Installation view, University Gallery, University of Galway, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Ros Kavanagh.

The Salvage Agency: TULCA Festival of Visual Arts

This year’s festival, which explored the role of art in contemporary ecology and environmental action, ranged from the most traditional of crafts to speculative contemporary performances.

Various venues, Galway
1–17 November 2024

by Bronac Ferran

Galway, in the far west of Ireland, hosts the annual TULCA festival of visual arts, which this year celebrated its 23rd iteration. Every year an invited Irish guest curator is encouraged to bring something fresh to the context, and this year the curator was Michele Horrigan, one of the most thoughtful of Ireland’s newer generation of contemporary art curators. The director of Askeaton Contemporary Arts, in County Limerick, Horrigan is also an artist whose practice engages with the lived consequences, including related environmental and social degradation, of global extractivist processes. Aspects of this theme found their way into the TULCA 24 programme, while her curatorial topic – The Salvage Agency – allowed for a broader series of interpretations.

I headed to Galway for a weekend during the festival, intrigued to see what Horrigan and the TULCA team, under its producer David Finn, had inserted among the existing cultural and historical narratives of a context in which the layering of the past already finds multiple manifestations in architectural and public spaces, not least around the network of interlacing streets that form the medieval heart of the city. Galway is also the gateway to the wonders of Connemara, a place of stone and steep cliff edges plunging to the Atlantic.

Lily Van Oost. Installation view, Galway Arts Centre, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Bronac Ferran.

Launched along with the festival was a publication edited by Horrigan that expands on The Salvage Agency theme in a kaleidoscopic fashion. In an introduction by Horrigan, she refers to “the agency and role of art in contemporary ecology and environmental action. Galway, on the edge of the north-east Atlantic is a unique location for a heightened awareness of what is at stake. Explorations of landscape, seascape and nature, public space, colonial history, political structures, the industrial complex and folk narratives are all pertinent … I have seen art continually create, in its undercurrent of improvisation and frugality, new social perspectives … The pretence of The Salvage Agency is a straightforward one – from the wreckage we’ve made, can art nourish a new reality?”

The affirmative nature of this question infiltrated various strands of the programme. Works by more than 20 artists were included. Some were selected by open call, others were commissioned. Some were Irish-related pieces, made over the last five decades, being re-envisioned for this context.

Horrigan told me that, conceptually, she was keen to allow art to “seep into other spaces”, beyond what she felt could be the “architectural austerity” of contemporary gallery spaces, that might be off-putting in terms of inviting a wider public to visit. The programme duly included talks, workshops, a performance-based bus excursion and an international gathering on art, activism and the environment. The University of Galway opened some of its museum collections and other sites to contemporary art interventions. In a city in which students make up a large percentage of the population, this extended the festival’s reach.

I went on foot (forsaking GPS) to see everything: from The Printworks contemporary art space to a fishing-tackle shop; from a site of medieval archaeological heritage to the university’s geology, marine biology and zoology museums; from the stylish Pálás film theatre to the tourist office; from an off-centre, artist-run venue to the city’s museum and its arts centre; from a hallowed academic quadrangle to a picturesque riverside walkway. In finding my way from one to another, I got a clear sense of how precise the curatorial cut by Horrigan was, into the existing social and cultural ecology of the city, so that the programme radiated out at various angles, as if it had grown out of the habitat rather than being imposed on it.

Seanie Barron's stick sculptures hanging in Freeney's Fishing Tackle shop. Installation view, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Bronac Ferran.

I started by joining a public walk exploring Galway’s industrial heritage. An age-diverse group gathered outside the museum and tourist office. Guided by a skilled local storyteller/historian, we headed down to the deep River Corrib, a historically important strategic route to the nearby Atlantic Ocean, not least under Ireland’s 800 years of political and military occupation by British interests from the 12th century onwards. It is a notoriously fast-flowing and voluminous river, conveying a sense of transience and temporality as well as patterns of recurrence. Indeed, later in the day in the fishing-tackle shop in the high street, where I went to see works by Seanie Barron, I was told that if I returned to the Corrib in the early spring, I would see hordes of salmon heading back to spawn upstream.

While much of the architectural history of a flow of material goods and people between other parts of Europe and this western seaboard has now disappeared, a few remnants are still standing. These became points of historical significance in the story the guide told us of the binding together of colonising, commercial, industrial and cultural forces within this location. We followed him along a path, below which a range of water management systems are entangled, devised by Victorian engineers, to support the then growing industrial development of this area. A large building across the river, we were told, was once one of the world’s leading whisky distilleries, owned by the family of Lady Gregory, playwright and primary patron of the Abbey Theatre and WB Yeats. Used by Galway International Festival to host Luke Jerram’s Mars project, plans are underway for its regeneration as a permanent venue. Along the same path, in a state of some disrepair, we saw a little bridge, named after Nora Barnacle, who lived in a nearby house before heading to Dublin and later meeting James Joyce, with whom she moved to Europe.

Street Protest, 15 November 2024, Galway. Photo: Bronac Ferran.

As we went by the main road, I saw a man hanging notices on posts. Unsure as to whether or not they were art, I took some pictures. On my way back, only a few minutes later, I saw they had been removed. One had said: RESTORE AUTONOMY OF BODY AND MIND; the second: END CENTRAL FALSE REALITIES, Restore the Right to Sane Perception, Actual Reality and Truth of Information. The third: BAN CENTRAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE [etc]. All were headed THE HUMAN NETWORK. Given this transience, I concluded they were external to the festival (though in several ways relevant).

Next, I went to the Galway tourist office, where John Carson’s 1974 work I’d Walk from Cork to Larne to See the Forty Shades of Green had been installed. For those not in the know, it probably seemed at first glance like a vintage tourist travel poster, the sort now in vogue. But it was a bit more radical than that when it was made. Carson, a Belfast-born artist now based in Pittsburgh in the US, walked from the city of Cork, deep in Ireland’s south, to Larne in the north over a fortnight in 1974. On his way, he took photographs of the colour green wherever it caught his eye, including a variety of fields in the south and the outfits of British soldiers north of the border.

John Carson's I'd Walk From Cork to Larne To See The Forty Shades of Green. Installation view, Galway Tourist Office, TULCA Festival. Photo: Bronac Ferran.

For anyone interested in Northern Irish performance art made during the period when the Troubles was at its worst, Carson’s works of the 1970s and 80s are seminal. He was part of a small, but highly formative group of artists who did stuff on the ground in Ulster at a time when hardly anyone from elsewhere, other than journalists, would visit. Crossing various media channels together, often mediated through the spoken word with his own harnessing of a Belfast vernacular, Carson pushed the boundaries of what was considered to be art, building bridges with popular culture. As part of their important work of investigation and reclamation of not yet fully documented aspects of Irish cultural history, within an international context, Askeaton Contemporary Arts produced the first substantial monograph on Carson in 2021.

It has been active, too, in stimulating deeper awareness of a radically feminist, ecologically engaged, Belgian-born artist named Lily van Oost (1932-97), who settled in the relatively isolated Black Valley in County Kerry in the 70s. A talented visual artist in various media, Van Oost opted from that point to use found and natural materials, within what was viewed as a polemical, quasi-outsider practice. However, as befits this period of reassessment of pioneering activist figures from the later decades of the last century, she has been receiving increasing posthumous acclaim among a younger generation of Irish artists.

Lily Van Oost. Installation view, Galway Arts Centre, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Bronac Ferran.

In the accompanying publication, Van Oost’s grounded practice is described as “evoking the intrinsic relationship between feminism, inhabitation and nature, weaving her own wool to make wall hangings and clothing”. As the informative exhibition at Galway Arts Centre showed, she began making animist textures with wool before shifting to working with nylon tights. A selection of what she produced was shown, with the aid of digitally restored, former analogue slides that form part of Ireland’s Women Artists Action Group, and a rather poetic film about her life and work, made by Michael Holly and Mieke Vanmechelefilm about her life and work, made by Michael Holly and Mieke Vanmechelen. On the wall, seeming like a spectral reclamation of Van Oost’s spirit in her later days, was a materially degraded, personally expressive work by the artist, recovered last year from a garage in Killarney, loaned by its owner Brian Bowler for this exhibition. It is suspected it might have given by the artist in exchange for repairs to her car.

We learned, too, from a process of reconstruction in the film, aided by Grace Wells, a poet and artist who stayed with and interviewed Van Oost during the 90s and who has loaned archival materials for this exhibition, that the sensibility that led to Van Oost finding a space of artistic refuge in Kerry, where she also developed a significant garden, was shaped by her dark early childhood experiences in Belgium. Van Oost became an Irish citizen in 1985. The sensitive mediation of her story within the context of a programme themed around the topic of The Salvage Agency became, in turn, exemplary of the timeliness of this curatorial concept.

That became manifest also on several levels in the group show (of works by nine artists) at The Printworks gallery, where Barron, whose practice is entirely based on found, natural and otherwise often overlooked materials, and who was first brought to cultural attention by Horrigan and Lynch, got pride of place. He works with sticks, in effect, that he finds in the habitat around where he lives in Askeaton, unearthing and untangling them from their deep roots, or picking them up around the Shannon estuary, then refining them in his own way, while retaining the specificity of their character. The artefacts he creates are described either as walking sticks (sometimes with the addition of other dimensions such as deer horns for handles), or as “priests”, the vernacular name for bits of wood used in fishing to hit the catch over the head. 

An award-winning film about Barron (also by Holly) was on display. This brought us on a memorable walk along a disused railway line with Barron, who drew us into the living experience of his reality of finding things that might be transformed by him into works by a blending of organic happenstance and rummaging in the undergrowth. Shot with care, the film reveals Barron’s articulate simplicity and directness that stands on its own, needing no explanation. Meanwhile, the chance to see some of his sticks in a context closer to their origins, seamlessly displayed among the plurality of paraphernalia in Freeneys fishing tackle shop in the nearby high street, remains one of the highlights of my visit.

Catriona Leahy, Bog Thing*: Assembly* for the Symbiocene. Installation view, Printworks, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Ros Kavanagh.

At The Printworks, I was also taken by a series of visually compelling 3D animated scans, made by artist Catriona Leahy, of the surfaces of Irish bogland areas from which peat had been extracted by mechanical forces over recent decades. These form part of a continuing investigation by Leahy into the effects of what the publication describes as “state-sponsored strip-mining – or ‘peat-harvesting’”, which has recently been stopped after growing public criticism of the degradation of the land within the midlands of the country in particular. Leahy takes a conceptually regenerative approach, reimagining the residual earth as a space where the human regime of occupancy and misuse can be challenged by turning this ravaged bogland into a site of positive reclamation. She calls the work Bog Thing*:Assembly* for the Symbiocene, with reference in the associated commentary to how she “has come to think of the bog as a ‘huge archive, a repository of memory’, which ‘harbours a lot of mythologies, and histories, and traumas of our own colonial past and the tensions that arise out of this’”.

There was a strong resonance here with two short films shown as part of a sequence of four selected by Horrigan. One, Whale Fall (2023) by Patrick Hough with a script by Owen Corrigan, is set in an Irish midlands bogland and is a funny, futuristic-style account of how two women – one older, one younger – come into fierce collision about the fate of a beached whale that has (somehow) ended up in this location. The most powerful expression in the film is through the single eye of the whale, that glowers at them, as if everything to do with the world’s survival depends on their decision. The other film, Super Gairdín (Super Garden, 2022), made by Michelle Doyle and Cóilín O’Connell, is a brilliantly dystopian, well-acted, tale, in Irish Gaeilge, of how a none-too-convincing employee of an enormous, homogenising, mass-market garden centre, gets terrorised by the seemingly mythic, but here all-too-real Hag of Béara. The effects and pacing are so expertly achieved that by the final frame of the film I felt as I was being thrown around into a different reality.

Meanwhile, at the University of Galway, founded in 1845 by Queen Victoria, there was a series of artistic interventions by contemporary artists. The most visible was an installation by Stephen Brandes in the university’s quadrangle. This, in contrast to the subtle and minimalist aspect of other works encountered in other spaces, was designed at a scale, and located in a position impossible to miss.

Stephen Brandes, The Night Garden, 2024. Freestanding billboard, installation view, The Quadrangle, University of Galway, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Bronac Ferran.

Brandes is known for often fresh, oblique and witty meshes of fictional and factual references. In The Salvage Agency publication, we learn that Brandes, on a speculative visit to the university, came across “an architectural sculpture” displaced from its original context, “placed, innocuously, despite its scale on a small access road”. This inspired him to interfere with the sculpture’s symbolism, which was associated directly with the British monarchy, featuring a lion, unicorn and ornamental shield, synonymous with the Royal Coat of Arms. It had been part of the portico of the Galway Courthouse, until removed (for its protection) during the 1919-21 war of independence in Ireland and relocated to the university for safekeeping.

Brandes took these various elements and rendered them into a new graphic composite, within which some taxidermy animals were added to the other emblems. Looking deliberately out of place within what he calls a “hallowed” context, Brandes’ ensuing sculpture makes us question what it is we are seeing. Blurring the lines between fiction and reality, it prompts us to question whether the original source still exists. And if so, how might we find the edge of the access road in which it is apparently located? Brandes is playing here with the ambivalence implicit in the concept of salvage that also carries with it a strong association with junk.

Back at The Printworks gallery, I saw various other works by Irish-based contemporary artists, including Remnants, by David Beattie, using ChatGPT. This related a fable about an ancient tree via headphones, while a touchscreen to the left invited interaction. The idea was simple but nicely executed. The screen had a 3D scan of an ancient stone circle that responded to haptic gesture; once shuffled around, the oral soundtrack also shifted and scrambled through various degrees from linear order to linguistic disorder.

David Beattie, Tokens, 2024. Installation view, The Hall of the Red Earl, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Bronac Ferran.

Beattie contributed four pieces in total to TULCA 2024. I particularly enjoyed the work installed in Druid Lane, in the middle of the city centre, where his minimalist aesthetic finds an interesting context in terms of intervening in the archaeological ruins of the Hall of the Red Earl, a venue used in the middle ages by Richard de Burgh, second Earl of Ulster, to collect taxes from townspeople. What was appealing about how the work was curated here was that visitors were left alone to find it rather than being guided directly.

This meant, at least in my case, that I combed through all the texts and historical maps around the walls of this freely accessible site, to see if somehow the work might be hidden or encoded within these. I also studied the wall cabinets, which hosted an array of unearthed artefacts and objects, such as inscribed gold rings, fragments of pottery and the tiny bones of baby pigs. In developing the work for this site, Beattie read deeply into its history from the 13th century to the present, discovering that it had become a smelting house for iron in the 16th and 17th centuries. This stimulated him conceptually to make the series of small steel spheres that were visible, when one looked closely in the right direction, in gaps on the ground among the fragments of stone ruins.

David Beattie, Tokens, 2024. Installation view, The Hall of the Red Earl, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Ros Kavanagh.

Beyond their smooth and rounded surfaces, these spheres carried a deeper meaning. Beattie made them, as he describes in The Salvage Agency book, by smelting and extracting precious metals from the catalytic converters of cars. He observed: “In a constant state of becoming something else, these minerals highlight the commodification of natural resources, and the environmental impact of mineral extraction.” This drew attention to the continuity of cycles of extractive human behaviours and how these are entangled with the machinery of power and influence.

Regina Jose Galindo, Tierra, 2013. Colour video, with sound, 33 min, 30 sec. Installation view, University Gallery, University of Galway, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo Ros Kavanagh.

A looming sense of machine-powered evisceration of a biodiverse landscape hangs over the Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo’s spellbinding, terror-invoking Tierra (2013). It was shown in a perfectly dark, silent, university gallery space – the optimum context within which to focus full attention on a work that concentrates intensely on time and space down into one locality. The artist stands, small and naked, alone in a field. A large, earthmoving excavator advances remorselessly towards her, destroying the top layers of soil around her. The work is a perfect embodiment of precarity and resilience. Soon the ground on which she is standing is reduced to a small island of soil and grass. In the seconds before its close, the video acquires a quasi-cubist aspect: we see many things simultaneously, as nothing (as ever in the domain of ecologically engaged art) is resolved; everything remains suspended at a point of mutual disclosure between past action and future contingency. A sense of a yawning violation of the space around Galindo is brilliantly communicated. I started to hope against hope that the worst did not happen. Galindo’s extreme performance hence becomes a salvaging of hope from the jaws of disaster.

Séan Lynch (left), in dialogue with Peter Fend at Printworks. Photo: Bronac Ferran.

I was present, too, for a talk at the Printworks space by Peter Fend, a US-born, long-term propagandist for art as a counteragency to corporate powers of global resource (mis)management. The talk accompanied a display of print materials and a documentary film made by Finn van Gelderen during a period Fend spent in Dublin in 2003, working on a public art project about wastewater in the city and arguing that deriving methane gas from seaweed might become a viable alternative to the use of oil. With the documentary film running directly behind him, we could see the juxtaposition of his figure as captured on camera in 2003 and his current persona, as he stood up to answer questions from his conversant, Séan Lynch. This had the effect of layering, where the images from 2003 disrupted our close listening to what he was saying about the present, which was made more difficult by his rapid-fire mode of articulation, combined with a performative raising of his arms to show us items in newspapers that were too small for us to read at a distance.

Fend advanced the speculative suggestion that Ireland might become a closer partner with India, as a strategic move that would allow, in his vision, a radically different approach to policy around dwelling near water sources and to exploiting together the promise of coastal seaweed to create ecologically beneficial biomass. Fend’s Ocean Earth Development Corporation, founded as a collaborative venture with some of his closest associates in the 80s, was conceived as a sort of travelling, polemical agency, creating confrontations in the terrain of art, power and the planet. His diagrammatic text- and image-based printed materials, which redraw maps and collage and fragment and recombine spatial geographical relations, drawing on policy documents and press materials, fit within a media art practice. They are now attracting growing interest within international visual art gallery contexts. While he has provoked wild scepticism in the past for many of his more outlandish ideas, might the time be coming for recognition that not everything in Fend’s conceptual laboratory is off the planet? Certainly, although performative, Fend is deadly serious about his ideas.

With its critically topical theme, and its willingness to range from the most traditional of crafts to speculative and contemporary performances, TULCA 2024 reinforced a sense of fostering and valuing individual artists while at the same time creating situations within which what they are making and producing finds a sense of societal connection. That a successful visual arts festival depended on a felt and genuine ecology of relations among its participants – whether local or visiting – became my primary takeaway from this event, which has left me feeling strongly like a Connemara salmon, looking forward to a return visit.

Bronac Ferran | Studio International | 06/12/2024

REVIEW: TULCA 2024 | Chris Clarke | Art Monthly

Seanie Barron dressed as An Poc Ar Buile (The Mad Puck Goat), c1970

REVIEW: Chris Clarke on TULCA 2024 | Art Monthly

TULCA 2024: The Salvage Agency

TULCA occupies most of the city’s arts spaces with a programme of performances, talks and screenings that elaborate on the festival’s central premise: how can art create something new from the wreckage of civilisation?

Chris Clarke is a critic and curator based in Cork.

Art Monthly Issue 482 is available to order here

View fullsize

View fullsize

Cover: Salvo, Untitled, 1987

REVIEW: Marc O'Sullivan Vallig on TULCA 2024 | Irish Examiner

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

REVIEW: TULCA 2023 | Rosa Abbott | Paper Visual Art

TULCA 2023: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise, multiple venues, Galway, 3–19 November 2023

A mysterious artist hovers around the programme for honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise. J.J. Beegan created a number of artworks during his stay at Netherne, a psychiatric hospital in East Surrey, sometime between the 1920s and ’40s. Beguiling and intimate works on paper, the artist’s drawings mostly depict animals, and many are signed ‘J.J. BEEGAN / SCULPTURER [sic] / DUNLORST / BALLINASLOE’. We don’t know much about Beegan – how he perceived his art practice, why he ended up in the asylum, whether he ever made it out. The drawings may have been preparatory drawings for sculptures, but there’s no way of knowing for sure. We also can’t be sure about the nature of his connection with Ballinasloe, a Co. Galway town that in local dialect is synonymous with St Brigid’s Hospital, the mental health institution it was home to for 180 years (‘to go to Ballinasloe’, in local idiom, means to have a mental health crisis). Beegan may have been from the town – perhaps a member of the Beegan family of stonecutters that can be recorded as living on Dunlo Street – or he may have had a stay at St Brigid’s. Who can say? With Netherne’s archives now destroyed or sealed, Beegan’s surviving artworks are the only material evidence of his existence.

Installation view of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise at TULCA Gallery, Galway, 2023. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Beegan’s artworks, now part of London’s Wellcome Collection, are not on show (physically, at least) within honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise, the 2023 edition of TULCA curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais. Inscribed on toilet paper with matchsticks, the drawings are just too fragile to travel. And yet they subtly permeate the exhibition programme: scanned drawings of strange animals slink onto festival branding, adorning programmes and window graphics; Beegan’s life and work are attentively discussed in the accompanying publication, taking on a symbolic and phantasmal role in the exhibition and posing questions about art-making, incarceration, archives, and (dis)ability. Who is afforded the voice to tell their own story, and who is recalled only in the medical and/or criminal reports of their custodians? Which artworks and archival materials warrant preservation and which are destroyed? Which artworks have cultural value and which are solely ‘therapeutic’, or simply ‘graffiti’, the daubings of the insane? Across six main venues, a publication and events programme, honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise teases out these questions and more.

The core venue is the TULCA Gallery on St Augustine Street – a cavernous former dole office, stripped to its concrete shell – and the first work we encounter upon entry is by Irish artist Bridget O’Gorman, who lives with a permanent spinal injury known as Cauda Equina Syndrome. Slings, hoists, and other apparatus of disability are suspended from the ceiling by elegant rods, straps, and hooks. This array of assistive devices is cast in unreinforced Jesmonite, a fragile resinous material with a chalky-seeming texture. Pinched into tubes, their floating, delicate forms show wrinkles, sags, and strain where they bend. I cannot help but think of them as limb-like, bodily: one two-pronged form dangles from the ceiling like a pair of legs, while a lipstick-red arch becomes a comic frown, a line drawing in space. Inspecting the latter closely, I notice a bulbous growth on its surface. Presumably the result of a split casting bag, it resembles a wart or abscess. A glass bubble protrudes from underneath another form, and the limp shreds of glue-on mosaics are draped under and over various tubes and poles. Conjuring prosthetic masks or skin-like forms, they bring to my mind the figure of Bartholomew in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, his flayed skin drooping down from a cloud.

Installation view of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise at TULCA Gallery, Galway, 2023, showing Bridget O’Gorman, Support | Work, 2023. Installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

O’Gorman is primarily a sculptor but hasn’t been able to produce work of this kind for several years due to the changing conditions of her disability. The creation of this work was supported by Ní Fheorais, who is also the artist’s producer, and by Arts and Disability Ireland, who funded access to a support worker. Accessibility, then, forms both the content and the process of the works, and Ní Fheorais’s programme at large. O’Gorman’s works are a celebration of support structures, making visible the contraptions she uses to operate on a daily basis, but also an expression of fragility. Each sculpture is precariously suspended; worm-like tubes that seem like they could easily snap, or crumble into powder. Theatrically spotlit during TULCA’s evening launch event, they cast strange shadows on the floor and walls, and carry the charged energy of animate objects, waiting to spring into life.

Also suspended from the ceiling are four textile works by German artist Philipp Gufler. From an ongoing series of fifty-two ‘quilts’ and counting, each of these works commemorates a queer figure – in this case, the late nineteenth-century judge and psychiatric memoirist Daniel Paul Schreber, Weimar-era sexologist Charlotte Wolff, 1980s artist Lorenza Böttner (a trans woman who had both arms amputated after climbing a pylon as a child), and the genderqueer star of Germany’s 2003 Pop Idol, Lana Kaiser. Rather than traditional portraiture, Gufler has invoked each of these figures through materiality, colour, form, texture, and patterning, telling their stories through visual and haptic means. Schreber’s Quilt, for instance, bears hallucinogenic patterns which undulate in and out of focus as they’re orbited, referring to the schizophrenic visions (including the strong feeling that he had transformed into a woman) recounted in his 1903 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, snippets of which trail snail-like around the fabric. Böttner’s Quilt is screen-printed three times with a modified photograph in which the artist appears playful and spectre-like, sheathed in gauzy fabric. Wolff’s features photographs of the subject from both a police document and by her friend Man Ray, presented in combination with a hand motif, a reference to her vocation as a palm reader while in exile from Nazi Germany. Finally, Gufler’s Quilt for Lana Kaiser has a clear personal resonance, collaged with photographs from the artist’s personal archive, many of which document occasions where he met the singer.

Philipp Gufler, Quilt #31 (Lorenza Böttner), 2021 Silk screen print on fabric, zipper, 95 x 180 cm. Courtesy BQ, Berlin, and the artist. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooji, Amsterdam

Offering creative and unconventional portrayals of their subjects, Gufler’s Quilts materialise the artist’s research into queer histories and figures: the artist is also a member of a queer archive in Munich, a pursuit that has clearly infused his art practice with fascinating content and visual sources. Each bearing roughly the same dimensions, the Quilts act like index cards of queer history, the four biographies chosen for TULCA spanning a period of almost 150 years. Individually, each story elucidated is fascinating. Collectively, they demonstrate the importance of remembering, of storytelling, and of looking to forebears and tracing a lineage. They point to the crucial power of the archive as a tool for bearing witness and preserving these stories. In an era in which right-wing media typifies transness as a contemporary (and invented) phenomenon, relaying the stories of figures like Schreber, Wolff, Böttner, and Kaiser give vital evidence of the existence (and struggles) of queer and gender non-conforming people throughout history. In an artist’s talk as part of the TULCA programme, Gufler pointed out that often, the only archival evidence of queer experience in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries comes in the form of medical or criminal reports (including the mugshot that appears on Wolff’s Quilt). The queer subject is rarely given a voice or permitted to tell their own story. Creating an archive through art-making that is brimming with wit, verve, and aesthetic power, then, offers a compelling counterpart to often punitive institutional reports.

Though titled Quilts, the dimensions of these works are somewhat smaller than the term might imply, and their materials are not very quilt-like (gauze and PVC both feature in this small selection). Use of this terminology is suggestive, however, of the long tradition of queer storytelling through quilt-making, most notably by various international strands of the NAMES Project, which memorialised the victims of the HIV/AIDS crisis. (Initiated in the US, the project spread to many locales including Ireland. The Irish NAMES Project’s quilts were also, coincidentally, exhibited last year at VISUAL Carlow.) Jamila Prowse, whose Crip Quilt (2023) is situated near that of Gufler in the TULCA Gallery, also continues this powerful legacy of storytelling through quilt-making. Prowse has embroidered colourful patches onto the surface of a weighted blanket, each one offering stitched musings or diaristic snapshots of day-to-day life, some from the artist’s own recollections, others drawn from oral histories by artists with disabilities. On a nearby wall, a series of monoprints by Paul Roy give darkly humorous sketches of his experience living with long-term illness (‘Drugs but not the fun kind’, reads one, ‘I can’t dance but I want to’ another). Shown side-by-side, Prowse’s and Roys’s offerings give two tonally divergent but equally frank first-person accounts of the life of an artist living with disabilities, enthused with emotion, humour, pathos, and prosaic detail.

Installation view of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise at TULCA Gallery, Galway, 2023, showing Paul Roy, (from left) I Can’t Dance, Hospital Food and Frozen, 2023. Monoprints, dimensions variable. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

The specific context of incarceration in Ireland is explored further in Galway Arts Centre. As Ní Fheorais’s essay in the publication shares, mid-twentieth-century Ireland had the world’s highest rates of incarceration per capita (astonishingly, more than Stalin’s USSR). This incarcerated population was distributed between prisons, Magdalene laundries, mother and baby homes, country homes, industrial schools, and orphanages, but the biggest proportion by far (around 0.7% of the population) was in mental health institutions such as St Brigid’s, Ballinasloe. This complex history is tackled head-on in bless every foot that walks its portals through (2023), Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha’s installation of paintings and audio works in response to the history and site of St Brigid’s. Ní Aodhna’s paintings are subdued and simplified, almost monochromatic renderings of the site and its vernacular architecture: stone-trimmed windows, heavy grey facades that shroud the interior in mystery, a solemn bell tower. A few jugs and hanging sheets can be glimpsed through the windows but not much else. Ushered into eclectic assemblages with wooden frames, the paintings are presented alongside needlework, small watercolours on paper, a painted shutter. In the accompanying audio, a gentle but rapid voice describes the material facts of the site, the specificity of its architectural detailing, finding a hushed poetry in attention to detail, and ruminating on the thorny relationship between colonialism and the Irish Free State’s policy of mass incarceration.

Installation view of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise at TULCA Gallery, Galway, 2023, showing Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha, the usual pieces of cloth (from bless every foot that walks its portals through), 2023. Audio and painting installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Also at Galway Art Centre, P. Staff’s seventeen-minute film Weed Killer (2017) takes a tenacious look at the politics of sickness, the body and biomedical technologies such as radiation treatments. Actress Debra Soshoux delivers a frank and impassioned monologue (adapted from Catherine Lord’s 2004 memoir The Summer of Her Baldness) detailing the abject horror of undergoing chemotherapy. Despite the bleakness of this subject matter, Soshoux’s chilling performance, coupled with striking thermogenic imagery, makes the film compelling viewing. Its harrowing account of bodily decay, focusing on the sensorial and animalistic – ‘No feasting and no fucking’ – is cut through with an emotional and impassioned lip sync performance by Jamie Crewe. Pulsating with desire and lived experience, Crewe’s blistering performance offers much-needed respite from Soshoux’s harrowing monologue, ruminating instead on the malady of lovesickness. Staff’s film demonstrates the fine line between sickness, cure, chemical treatment, and intoxication, likening chemo to ingesting weed killer. By casting trans women in the performing roles, the artist creates links between different kinds of medicalised bodies and highlights the politicised nature of healthcare.

With support from Arts and Disability Ireland, a huge effort has been made to make the TULCA programme as accessible as possible, from providing closed captioning and audio descriptions of video works to hanging wall-based works at a lower level to provide a more inclusive viewing experience. There is also plenty of seating available and moments to rest built into the architecture of the display, which feels generous to all kinds of bodies. The exhibition space at Outset, across the road from the TULCA Gallery on St Augustine Street, has even been transformed by queer collective Bog Cottage into a pleasant space to sit and reflect, socialise, and slow down. Styled as a ‘faerie fort’, a sense of play and mischief as well as relaxation is implied. Cheeky motifs of feasts and animals adorn colourful curtains made from recycled textiles, sourced in charity shops in Berlin. Fragments of poetry by Ainslie Templeton spill across the patchworked fabrics, while a mellifluous sound piece by Renn Miano impels one to linger a little longer, lolling on the custom-made seating and interacting with fellow visitors.

As well as inclusion, Bog Cottage’s work points to the importance of socialities in Ní Fheorais’s curatorial approach. This is the first TULCA since 2019 to be permitted an afterparty, so it feels pertinent that a space has been created to facilitate connection, intimacy, friendship, and community-building. These are themes that resonate throughout the programme, also coming into focus in Sean Burns’s Dorothy Towers (2022), an enchanting thirty-one-minute film about two residential tower blocks on the outskirts of Birmingham. The postwar development’s proximity to several gay nightclubs made it an unexpected haven for LGBTQ folk, particularly during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Shot on 16 mm, Burn’s film transforms the towers into shining beacons, windows shimmering in the light like synthetic gemstones. The artist celebrates the modernist architecture of the site, with its colourful tiled underpasses, overpasses, subways, and flyovers. Interviews with residents, including legendary club kid Twiggy and drag queen Seema Butt, reflect on the difficulties faced by queer residents in the ’80s and ’90s, and the importance of community bonds in the face of such hardship.

Installation view of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise at TULCA Gallery, Galway, 2023, showing Rouzbeh Shadpey, Forgetting Is The Sun, 2023. Video, duration 14 minutes 34 seconds. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Ní Fheorais is a native Galwegian who has based herself, in recent years, in Dublin, London, and Berlin. She brings to TULCA a deep awareness and sensitive consideration of the context of the West of Ireland. Aware of the region’s complex histories in relation to mental illness, state care, and incarceration, Ní Fheorais is able to situate this within an international and intersectional context. Her programme and its accompanying publication draw parallels between the struggles faced by disabled communities and other groups that have been medicalised and ‘othered’ by a paternalistic state – most prominently LGBTQ+ and, in particular, trans people. Writing, film, sound, storytelling, and experiential works all have a strong presence in the programme, bridging the gap between archival research and more immersive, haptic, and sensory experiences. This is a valuable way to shine a light on stories that have been previously confined to archives, such as the one in which Beegan’s artworks were found.

The title of this TULCA, honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise, comes from an Irish folk cure for what would have once been referred to as ‘madness’. No bold claims linking the ‘curatorial’ and the ‘curative’ are made here, but the programme does offer a generous, compassionate, and tender reflection on its sometimes challenging subject matter of sickness and incarceration, offering moments of humour, theatricality, and even a soupçon of glamour to help the medicine go down.

Rosa Abbott is a writer and curator based in London.