REVIEW: On The Medical Condition Of A Landscape | Theresa Zwerschke | Arts Of The Working Class

 

On The Medical Condition Of A Landscape | Theresa Zwerschke

Notes on honey, milk & salt in a seashell before sunrise - the 21st edition of TULCA Festival in Galway.

What else is a landscape than a “backdrop for the experience of seeing”? [1]

I’m sitting on the train to Galway, to attend the opening of the 21st edition of TULCA, an art festival in the West of  Ireland. As my gaze slides over green fields divided by neatly stacked stone walls, some are occasionally inhabited by herds of sheep, confirming my presumptuous, romanticized idea of pastoral Ireland. I think of Lucy Lippard's definition of landscape as an activity, “a way of seeing the world and imagining our relationship to nature.” [2] Landscape as an actively produced image, emerging from an external perspective that gets mediated through experiences, knowledge, ideologies, and the historical narrative written into it. 

The exhibition honey, milk & salt in a seashell before sunrise addresses a landscape of  medical incarceration. One that is deeply embedded in Ireland’s history of mental health institutions and inseparable from its colonial past. Tracing back to the 1830s, a time when Ireland was ruled by England, the institutions hold evidence of the aftermath of this period of domination and the implications it left on the medical complex. Consequences of the British occupation, such as oppression, poverty, or migration of family members played a role in the incarceration of many in those hospitals. The medical condition of the Irish landscape forms the backdrop for our experience of seeing. Questions around access, health, home, and belonging are posed and contested in the context of the festival. Spread over various locations in and around Galway, a harbor town of 83.500 in the West of the country, TULCA presented a festival including exhibitions, screenings, talks, readings, and a mediation program in November 2023. 

“In the 1950s, Ireland imprisoned more of its population than any other state at the time, the  largest cohort of which were living in mental health institutions,“ [3] writes the curator Iarlaith Ní Fheorais in the accompanying publication. Committed for various reasons and labeled “mentally ill” or “socially dysfunctional”, inmates of these hospitals, which were located in many Irish towns were segregated from the local economy in sites that were, first and foremost, centers of control. 

The history of medical incarceration inscribes itself into the landscape of West Ireland, with mental hospitals, built in an “X” shape with a central watchtower, as is the case of the St. Bridgit Hospital in Ballinasloe in Galway. In its resemblance to prison architecture, the building presents itself as an almost perfect example of Michel Foucault’s panopticon: the surveilling architecture of the disciplinary society, which inevitably prompts understanding of the history of mental health institutions as being interconnected with the prison industrial complex. 

The Black Panther Party continuously addressed this connection in the US American context in the 1960s and 1970s, challenging the medical and legal abuse in both structures, but also the “racialized norms of able-mindedness, which constructed appropriate behavior, mental states, emotions, and reactions based on white male middle-class norms,” [4] as Sami Schalk writes in TULCA’s publication. In light of the Panthers’ abolitionist activism, it seems crucial to understand the structural workings of power in the history of medical incarceration through a confrontation with its intersectional layers of gender, class, and race.

fig. 1

These controlling and regulating functions of mental health institutions are explored in Aisling-Oi Ní Aodha’s work bless every foot that walks its portal through (2023), which consists of collages and an accompanying audio essay. Depicting architectural drawings of St. Brigid's Hospital, reminiscent of classic landscape paintings, the collages break through their supporting structures; these include little wooden bricks, strings, and embroideries, which visiblize the structure of the work itself, as well as the constructed-ness of the system that produced St. Bridgit’s architecture. In contrast to the oral cultural tradition, painting was a medium imposed by the British, says the artist. Visuality, the sense that is connected most with measuring, categorizing, and control is imposed by the colonizer. Appropriating and disrupting a traditional way of representation, for Ní Aodha, is also a way of interfering with the colonizer's tools. 

Repurposing tools of display and presentation is not only seen in multiple works within the show but also in TULCA’s exhibition design. Access tools, which are often regarded as merely functional and in opposition to aesthetic, curatorial, and artistic decisions, seem to merge effortlessly into the exhibition architecture and contest ableist display standards. Frames are hung 110 cm from the ground, which orients to the viewing height of someone sitting in a wheelchair, creating a new norm of seeing in the show. Audio descriptions of video works become part of the formal language of the films. In Holly Marie Parnell’s Cabbage (2023), made in collaboration with her brother David, whose communication device - involving an eye movement tracing technology - gives the film its structure. By following David and their mother preparing for relocation back to Ireland (which they had to leave due to changes in disability services), the work documents the family’s relationship, and beautifully speaks of the wholeness of a human life beyond medical categorizations and care schedules. In the film, as their mother goes through boxes of old medical records detailing the clinical violence of fitting the essence of a human being into scales, the narrating audio carries the viewer into David’s reality. 

fig. 2

TULCA’s narratives do not remain in an observing position, but instead approach the medical landscape through lived experience. “A lived-in  landscape becomes a place, which implies intimacy.” [5] This intimacy Lippard mentions is reflected in the booklet Access Intimacy [6] the exhibition offers, as well as in the language of those, who don’t enjoy the luxury of regarding the medical complex as a landscape; those for whom it conditions their experience of place. Bridget O’Gorman’s fragile installation, Support I Work (2023), was produced in close collaboration with her support worker. The hanging elements, made with medical support materials, both hold and fracture the sculptures, they document a translation of ideas into material, and thereby speak of the intimacy of their shared production.

fig. 3

In Anna Roberts-Gevalt’s work Ridgewood Sick Center (2023), featuring a billboard in the University Hospital of Galway, I find drawings of a mountain landscape built from the artist's bed sheets. Between references to “sick ancestors” the billboard invites visitors to an audio tour and a radio broadcast from the hospital, for which patients can request songs as wishes via their phones. Passing patients, nurses, and visitors while walking through the labyrinth of aisles not only puts the hospital itself on display but also makes everyone in the hospital a potential festival participant. 

fig. 4

Sean Burns’ film Dorothy Towers (2023) sensitively records the lived experience of inhabitants of two residential blocks in Birmingham that were built in 1971, and which has been a long-time home for the LGBTQ+ community. Long-shot architectural sequences are merged with interviews and archival documentation of a generation of inhabitants, celebrating their togetherness amidst the horrors of the AIDS pandemic. His film - partly shot on 60mm - is shown at the 126 Gallery, the only artist-run space in Galway. The nostalgia connects with my own melancholy thoughts about the role of economic changes in erasing self-organized art and subculture. Walking from one festival location to the other, through cute little streets with stylish cafés and local shops, I can’t help but be struck by the contrast of the homeliness, with which contemporary Galway presents itself and the hauntings of its past. 

Leila Hekmat’s film, Symptom Recital: Music for Wild Angels (2023), which premiered in the Pàlàs  Cinema on the fourth of November, troubles the landscape/place distinction using a sassy theatrical performance centered on the “Hospital Hekmat”, in which “the patients and staff share a hysterical language.” [7] Inhabitants of the Hospital share their stories and desires while shifting in and out of roles and chants, mocking and teasing each other (and their audience) and throwing rigid parameters of care, sexuality, and well-being into question. Acknowledging the fluidity and social determination of the protagonist’s positions on a scale between binary poles of sickness and health ties Hekmat’s film to the core demands of The Mental Patients Union, founded by both patients and hospital workers within the antipsychiatry movement of the 1970s. In their connection to Marxist ideology, the MPU demanded a questioning of the economic forces at play in categorizations of “sickness” and “health”, placing mental illness “in the context of capitalism, to disentangle it from the biological and psychoanalytic theories that defined it,” [8] as Roisin Agnew elaborates.

fig. 5

The hegemonic indoctrination of collective remembrance is faced with the position of forgetting as a physical condition in Rouzbeh Shadpey’s video essay Forgetting is the Sun (2023). The film intercuts sequences of his grandmother’s hands repeating answers to a memory test imposed by an invisible narrator with archival footage of other video essays by Forough Farrokhzad and Ahmed Bouanani. Considering individual forgetting as both an act of resistance against biopolitical forces and a moment for achieving composure, the narrator states: “Through the lens of her camera, Fourough afforded those deep lepers the gift of the impossible - that is: the possibility to forget.“ [9] 

Philipp Gufler’s Memorial Quilts (2022) entangle the relationships between individual and collective memory by asking who are the ones that are remembered. The quilts offer a glimpse into Philipp Gufler's extensive, ongoing research into historically underrepresented queer personas upon which he works closely together with Forum Queeres Archiv, München. Depicting stylized, collaged portraits of queer German ancestors - the pop star Lana Kaiser, the painter Lorenza Böttger, the writer Daniel Paul Schreber, and the doctor, sexologist, and writer Charlotte Wolff - these quilts make those portrayed symbols for the celebration of queer life, and the work pushes against their systemic historical erasure. 

TULCA festival is dedicated to the Ballinasloe-born artist and sculptor J.J. Beagan, who according to Clair Wills’ extensive research, spent most of his life in institutions, such as the Netherne Mental Hospital in Surrey, England. While the decision to not display his work in the exhibition resulted more from logistical than conceptual reasons - his drawings, which are now part of the Adamson Collection, were too delicate to be transported, and instead are printed in the accompanying booklet - it does open relevant questions about the reproduction of medical violence through the displaying so-called “Outsider Art”. Is there a way of presenting a body of work, like J.J.Beagan’s without replicating the pathologizing gaze that perpetuates landscapes of medical incarceration within cultural spaces? To detach the artwork from the clinical language which justified their expropriation, collection, showcasing, and ensuing market value as Outsider Art, seems to provide a first step in changing the narratives attached to his art. Nonetheless, it also demands a shift in the way the works are displayed and perceived because as long as the ways we address, show, and review the art of disabled artists differ from those of able-bodied artists, contemporary art and culture will reproduce these stigmas. Dedicating the festival to J.J. Beagan instead of being about him, celebrating his work rather than pathologizing it, might offer a starting point to break with both the institutional erasure of subjecthood for artists who have been incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, and of the framing of such artists’ remembrance through art historical categories. TULCA for me is a reminder that a changing of the means of representation is needed to form the basis for rethinking the narratives inscribed into the medical landscape, and onto the bodies that inhabit it. According to Carolyn Lazard: „To commit to disability justice is to redefine the terms of subjecthood“. [10]     

I am not a dreg of society 

I am a loved and wanted person 

I am not a dependent person 

I am an interdependent person 

I am a skilled poet 

I am not a heterosexual woman 

I am a survivor in today’s times. [11] 

 

In her opening speech, Iarlaith Ní Fheorais called the festival “a love letter to Galway”. This feels bittersweet when regarding it through the angle TULCA offers. Admittedly, though, this text is a little bit of a love letter itself. One written with a deep appreciation for the dedication to accessibility and disability justice of my dear friend Iarlaith, and for the impressive group of artists she brought together in this festival. What Iarlaith and I share is an abiding interest in the particularities of history in locality, and a persuasion that “the local” can never only be a static, romanticized image. 

\\

Feb 09 2024

  • Theresa Zwerschke

    (*1993, Germany) works as an artist, organizer and educator with a specific interest in cultural practices striving for systemic change. Her practice is situated at the intersection of critical pedagogy, artistic research, and socio-political knowledge production. She holds a BA in Art Pedagogy (University of Leipzig), a Diploma in Fine Arts (HGB Leipzig), and an MA from the Dutch Art Institute.

  • FOOTNOTES

    [1] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 2007) 8.  

    [2] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The  New Press, 2007) 8.  

    [3] Iarlaith Ní Fheorais, “From Ballinasloe to Netherene: The Drawings of J. J. Beangan,” in honey,  milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise (Galway: TULCA Publishing, 2023) 5.

    [4] Sami Schalk, “Making Connections: Prisons and Mental Institutions,” in honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise (Galway: TULCA Publishing, 2023) 52.

    [5] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The  New Press, 2007) 7. 

    [6] Mia Mingus, Access Intimacy: The Missing Link, (Leaving Evidence Blog: https://  leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/) last access:  28.11.23

    [7] Leila Hekmat, Symptom Recital: Music for Wild Angels, Video, 86 min, 2023. 

    [8] Róisín Agnew, “The Mental Patients’ Union,” in honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise  (Galway: TULCA Publishing, 2023) 39. 

    [9] Rouzbeh Shadpey, Forgetting is the Sun, Video, 14:34 min, 2023.

    [10]  Carolyn Lazard, Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice (Recess Publication: 2019) 9. 

    [11] Carol K. Kallend, “The Lone Dreg Seaks Back,” in honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise (Galway: TULCA Publishing, 2023) 17.

     

    IMAGE CREDITS

    Cover: Leila Hekmat, Symptom Recital - Luzie Naters, Filmstill, 2023 © Leila Hekmat.

    fig. 1: Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha, bless every foot that walks its portal through, 2023 © Ros Kavanagh.

    fig. 2: Bridget O’Gorman, Support I Work, 2023 & Philipp Gufler, Quilt #47: Charlotte Wolf, 2022 © Ros Kavanagh.

    fig. 3: Anna Roberts Gevalt, Ridgewood Sick Center, 2023 © Ros Kavanagh.

    fig. 4: Sean Burns, Dorothy Towers, 2022 © Ros Kavanagh.

    fig. 5: Rouzbeh Shadpey, Forgetting Is the Sun, 2023 © Ros Kavanagh.

 
Source: https://www.artsoftheworkingclass.org/text...

REVIEW: The Paucity of Care | Chris Hayes | Texte Zur Kunst

 

Jenny Brady, “Music for Solo Performer,” 2022, in “honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise,” TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, 2023

The Paucity of Care | Chris Hayes

Over the course of the last century, no nation in the world institutionalized a greater proportion of its population than Ireland did. A significant portion were confined in mental institutions established by the British. The material remnants of this colonial history still leave their mark on the landscape of western Ireland. Highlighting Ireland’s west as a terrain of medical infrastructure and control, the recent TULCA Festival of Visual Arts in Galway prompted artists to examine the region’s relationship with medicine. Not surprisingly, the exhibited works center around on themes of accessibility, cure, and care. But, as Chris Hayes describes, this focus extends beyond the artworks to encompass considerations in exhibition design: through a collaboration with the advocacy group Arts & Disability Ireland, tools for accessibility, often viewed as afterthoughts to aesthetic and curatorial decisions, productively integrate into TULCA’s structure.

Every year, TULCA, an annual arts festival in Galway on the west coast of Ireland, invites a new curator to shape its program. The constant entry and exit of a central figure becomes a familiar foundation to the festival’s surrounding discourse, inviting comparisons between the latest edition and previous years. For Iarlaith Ní Fheorais, curator of the 21st edition, entitled “honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise,” a partnership with advocacy group Arts & Disability Ireland represents a practical choice and also a deeper statement of intent that reverberates through the many video installations, audio works, paintings, sculptures, quilts, and performances. The focus on accessibility was notable in multiple small and large ways: captioning for video installations; a dedicated masked launch event; audio described tours during the course of the program. But most strikingly, the inherent accessibility in the program is connected with a deeper conversation around disability and bodily difference.

Take Jenny Brady’s Music for Solo Performer (2022), for example. The single-channel video installation is a meditation on varied notions of the body told through the idiosyncratic relationship the artist’s mother had with the American singer and comedian Jerry Lewis. Blending pop culture, biography, and the history of technology, the film shifts fluidly across varied notions of embodiment and the body: the camera pans across close-up shots of computer motherboards, microchips, and a digital rendering of the contours of a brain, visually suggesting each is a comparable system; we hear about Lewis’s philanthropic support of disabled children; we see footage of a soldier with a disfigured face that has been “fixed” with AI, so the visuals on screen glitch and flicker, blurring the line between skin and mask, background and foreground, history and contemporary reimagining. The montage of scenes revolves around illness, injury, and attempts to use technology to resolve the inescapability of the body’s fragility.

I first saw this film with the audio-visual captioning. The viewing experience appeared to be modified slightly, perhaps slowed down in specific scenes, although I wasn’t certain. The interplay between archival images from the history of medical institutions, TV reels of science experiments on the intersection of the body and machines, and Lewis’s high-flying energetic presence is held together by the artist’s voiceover. It’s only in the second viewing, without the audio-visual captioning, that making a distinction between the “original” and the “accessible” version became possible, despite how slight and partial it was. At one level, the content of Brady’s work is a funny and heartfelt reflection on the body, ageing, and disability. But the interplay between voice, text, and image on screen is clearly shaped and informed by the dynamics of audio-visual captioning itself, both as an artistic gesture and perhaps a politics, too.

“honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise,” TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, 2023

“Honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise” has been contextualized within the medical histories of Ireland, and more specifically, of the surrounding rural areas of Galway. “To go to Ballinasloe,” writes Ní Fheorais in her curatorial text, “was a once familiar turn of phrase for many in the West of Ireland.” [1] The euphemism referred to the mental health facility by the town which is close to Galway city, but the need for indirect speech and implication gestures toward a wider culture of stigma and silencing. Ballinasloe is significant in many ways; notably it was one of the first mental health institutions with an arts therapy program in the world, but it is also notable how unremarkable, how ordinary, it was within the cultural and political landscape of a country where institutionalization was a common fact for many. In the 1950s, Ireland had one of the highest rates of institutionalization in the world – a much higher rate than comparable statistics found in the USA or Soviet Union. The practice of artist J. J. Beegan is foregrounded in the festival’s curatorial text and related material, although none of his work is present in the exhibitions. Beegan was an artist and sculptor who was a longtime resident of a mental health facility in Surrey, England, during the 1940s, but he claimed repeatedly to be from Ballinasloe and often made references to it in his drawings made from burnt matches and toilet paper. It’s not certain if this is true. But by referencing the life of Beegan as a symbol for others who have been denied agency, and by contextualizing this discussion within the troubled legacy of institutionalization in Ireland and elsewhere, the festival draws a link between the politics of the body and the production of art.

Beyond a conceptual framing, bodily difference can pose practical problems. As Bridget O’Gorman was physically unable to make her sculptural works, she collaborated with an assistant, Sandra McAlister, to create works that bear witness to their own construction. While it’s not uncommon for high profile, commercially successful artists to rely on a team of assistants to scale up their production, the context of need shifts how we can understand O’Gorman’s choice, while also bringing in notions of collaboration, exchange, and change – all artists rely on a support network, whether that’s family, friends, peers, and other more professional services, yet disability makes this more explicit and urgent. In the gallery, a range of delicate, slight sculptural forms sit, hang, and lean. Slings and hoists hold the work, and are also part of it. Other medicalized material accompanies the fragile, beautiful jesmonite forms cast from assistive devices. The installation occupies the space as if it was a trace of something else or another activity. Reflecting on the process behind the works, the artist wrote: “You had the notion of casting limbs, yes you would call them limbs because for one thing, they posit a gesture. What you mean is that they speak to vulnerability, a vulnerability to be rehearsed or enacted against the hostile architecture of the gallery.” [2]

Just across the street in a modest exhibition space, the artist duo Roberta Murray and Orla Meagher, members of the collective Bog Cottage, created a space in the style of a faery fort for festival visitors to rest and recharge. Rooted in Irish folklore, these forts are typically modest creations: the ruins of circular stone buildings from early Christian Ireland, they are often little more than a dirt mound, piles of stones, and a clump of trees. For their installation, Faery Fort(2023), Bog Cottage created a calming space with an ambient soundtrack, embroidered fabrics hung from the ceiling, and seating. It was created to be welcoming to neurodivergent people, while also providing a place of rest, and it also hosted an immersive meditative workshop during the course of the festival. Beyond the installation’s functional and practical role, its details, such as the images embroidered into the fabrics and an accompanying poem by Ainslie Templeton, embody something of a devilish spirit akin to those of the faeries themselves. As Templeton’s poem states: “The line between a blessing & curse is vexed.”

Bog Cottage, “Faery Fort,” 2023, in “honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise,” TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, 2023

Where O’Gorman confronts the process and form of her work through a lens of the body and its fragility, Bog Cottage creates a space that is conscious of the visitor’s own needs, particularly the strain of navigating a city-wide series of exhibitions and events. Other works extend the conversation to landscape and community. Sean Burns’s film Dorothy Towers (2022) looks at a social housing development in Birmingham, which took on a particular significance for the gay community; it discusses HIV stigma and far-right violence, but also tender moments of identity, self discovery, and care. Both Sarah Browne’s film Echo’s Bones (2022), a collaborative project with young autistic people that makes reference to an unpublished Samuel Beckett story, and Rouzbeh Shadpey’s Forgetting Is the Sun (2023), a video essay that draws links between a dementia test and the legacy of Iranian resistance, are structured around the experiences of autism and dementia. And Holly Márie Parnell’s Cabbage (2023) is a filmic portrait of her brother David’s experience with austerity-driven cuts to disability services, telling a story of bureaucratic hurdles that is tender, heartbreaking and, at times, fiendishly funny. Across a myriad of works, disability and illness are the starting points for an artistic engagement with visual language, particularly film; this engagement is the basis of a critique of capital and institutionalism, and has an impact on the relationships the artists conceive between themselves, their subjects, and their audiences.

As the vocabulary of “care,” “accessibility,” and “representation” is increasingly adopted by galleries and museums across the art world, while efforts toward inclusion are too often partial or absent, it feels all the more important to not forget about how bodies have been medicalized and how institutions have perpetrated violence, and to think more precisely about what this remembering might entail. With this history in mind, the ways in which the artists at TULCA are exploring an expanded aesthetic around accessibility, the relationship between text, image, audio, and the audience, and notions of productivity and process takes on another level of significance that resonates beyond the festival.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, November 3–19, 2023

Chris Hayes is an Irish writer based in London. His work has been published by Art Monthly, ArtReview, Burlington Contemporary, Frieze, Tribune, and The White Review, amongst many others.

Image credit: Courtesy TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, photo Ros Kavanagh

NOTES

[1]Iarlaith Ní Fheorais, “From Ballinasloe to Netherne: the Drawings of J. J. Beegan,” in honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise, exh. cat., ed. Iarlaith Ní Fheorais (Galway: TULCA Publishing, 2023), 4.

[2]Bridget O’Gorman, “Hoist (Act I),” in Support | Work, commissioned by TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. Available online at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c799b17755be23799b82d54/t/65442e576f101f2c44250b79/1698967127644/Support+_+Work_Final_Text.pdf.

Feb. 23, 2024

 
Source: https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/articles/c...

REVIEW: Accessing home: disability and place | Iarlaith Ní Fheorais | Burlington Contemporary

‘To go to Ballinasloe’ was once a familiar turn of phrase for many in the West of Ireland. Synonymous with the stigma of a mental health crisis and subsequent institutionalisation, it was often said in low, hushed tones about a friend or relative, only to be quickly followed by a jolt of dreadful recognition. The town of Ballinasloe in County Galway is home to St Brigid’s Hospital, which was established in 1833 as the Connacht District Lunatic Asylum. As such, the town came to be almost solely associated with the hospital and its purpose, and ‘to go to Ballinasloe’ became a shorthand for someone experiencing a mental health crisis or committal to psychiatric services. After the introduction of deinstitutionalisation in the late 1980s, the hospital entered a period of decline and finally shuttered its doors in 2013. The building itself is a large, limestone structure that dominates the surrounding landscape, designed in the shape of an ‘X’ with a central tower, which sits like a proud steeple. Still to this day, many families in the region have a connection to the hospital, either as patients, staff or relatives of either.

It is not just Ballinasloe that is used as a metonym for such diagnoses and their negative perception – many places in Ireland have garnered this reputation, including Grangegorman, Portrane and Our Lady’s Hospital in Cork. The fear that these places once provoked is wholly appropriate when one considers Ireland’s dark history of incarceration. In the twentieth century, Ireland imprisoned more of its population than any other country in the world. In the 1950s, one per cent of people living in Ireland were institutionalised and uniquely, the largest cohort were in state-controlled mental health facilities.1 In 1951 Ballinasloe had a population of 5,596, of whom 2,078 were patients at St Brigid’s, thus forming the basis of the town’s socio-economic identity. Given the scale of incarceration, it is inevitable that many of those living in such institutions did not in fact have mental health, intellectual or developmental disabilities. Rather, people were committed for a wide range of reasons, including inheritance disputes, as a means of control, to disappear family members and to relieve the pressures of poverty and migration.2 The lasting impact of these institutions has weighed heavily on how many disabled people relate to a sense of place, and their feelings of home and belonging. In this way, the state’s response to disability and its treatment was a defining political force in the formation of the early Irish state and its sense of modernity.

It is within this legacy of mass medical incarceration that the 21st edition of the TULCA Festival of Visual Arts took place in Galway (3rd–19th November 2023) FIG.1 FIG.2. Taking its title, honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise, from an Irish folk cure for what was described as ‘madness’, the festival responded to the evolving experiences of disability and medicine in the West of Ireland and elsewhere.3 It reflected on the role and legacy of institutions such as St Brigid’s and how ideas of health and treatment can shape both landscapes and communities. The works of art and texts also examined how these places have affected people on a personal level: how medicine shapes our connection to place and the intimacy of access. This article discusses a number of works exhibited in the festival in relation to these legacies that speak through anti-ableist,4 abolitionist and disability justice perspectives.5

honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise is dedicated to the Ballinasloe-born artist and sculptor J.J. Beegan. In his drawings, he drew animals, such as birds, fish, lions and donkeys, as well as flowers and human figures in a sketch-like style, reminiscent of the drawings of the Irish artist Paul Roy (b.1967) FIG.3. At some point in the 1920s, he came to live in Netherne Hospital in Surrey, although there is no available information about how he arrived in England or why he was committed – nor indeed his dates of birth or death. Netherne Hospital was renowned for its art therapy programme, which was established by Edward Adamson in 1946. However, even before the arrival of Adamson, Beegan was already making art, using burnt matches to draw on toilet paper. These materials are extremely delicate, and it must have required great concentration and skill not to break the matchstick or tear the paper.

In one work FIG.4, Beegan drew two fish and named them ‘FIKE’ – most likely meaning pike – and ‘BULL FISH SHSIMLER TAPERCH’. Alongside these names, the fish were identified as being found in the ‘AUGHRIM RIVER’ and the ‘RIVER BARROW’. The Aughrim and Barrow rivers are both located in the south-east of Ireland, and the Aughrim is particularly renowned for fishing. In another charred matchstick work FIG.5, Beegan drew what appears to be three heart-shaped flowers, with a long rectangular object – perhaps a gravestone or medicine bootle – floating above. Two of the flowers have spiky petals, like crowns, with only the right flower retaining its stems. Text on the object reads ‘J.J. BEEGAN SCULPTERER DUNLOR ST BALLINASLOE’. Although it is impossible to confirm, it seems very likely that with this inscription Beegan is naming himself, identifying his profession as a sculptor and naming a relationship – and possibly home – in Ballinasloe. Beegan’s drawings were found damaged in a bathroom that was used for storage in Lambeth Hospital, London, where Adamson’s collection had been transferred following the closure of Netherne in 1996. An unknown number of his other works have been lost. Considering the fact that they were given the title of ‘graffiti’ even today, it is not difficult to imagine them simply being discarded.

Much of what is known know about Beegan comes from Clair Wills’s essay ‘Life pushed aside’, which was published in the London Review of Books in 2021. Because the records from Netherne Hospital are sealed, the details of Beegan’s life may be lost to what is a painfully common and violent institutional erasure. However, his work remains a testament to his life beyond the hospital walls, and a life lived between landscapes of medical incarceration. As Wills succinctly summarises:

J.J. Beegan was living in his own afterlife. The future was taken away from him and he chose not to live in the present. He didn’t draw the people around him on the ward or the views from the windows; he drew what he remembered from the life he had lived before. His pictures were his only means of communication, including perhaps with himself. On them he kept writing a name and address – the person he thought he should have been, or perhaps the person he wished he had been: J.J. Beegan, Sculpturer, Dunlo Hill, Ballinasloe.6

As part of TULCA, Beegan’s potent claim to selfhood was explored in a screening at Ballinasloe Library of Abandoned Goods (2014), a short essay film by Edward Lawrenson and Pia Borg that examines the art made by those living at Netherne, including Beegan. It was accompanied by a talk delivered by Wills, in which she described her search for Beegan and, crucially, discussed what happens when we cannot trace people. What, then, does the evidence amount to?

The site of St Brigid’s is examined in the audio and painting installation bless every foot that walks its portals through FIG.6 FIG.7by Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha (b.1996). The three paintings focus on architectural details of the hospital, creating a haunting intimacy with the site that still dominates the landscape. At the same time, the audio explores the hospital’s role within imperial rule in Ireland and the subsequent Free State policy of mass incarceration. In her film Echo’s Bones FIG.8 Sarah Browne (b.1981) examines sites of medical confinement. Named after the unpublished Samuel Beckett story of the same title, the film was made collaboratively with a group of young autistic people from North Dublin and takes place in the north country Dublin town of Portrane, which is home to St Ita’s Hospital. The project began with the group watching films made by neurodiverse artists, such as Mel Baggs’s In My Language (2007), Sharif Persaud’s The Mask (2019) and Jess Thom’s Me, My Mouth and I (2018), before collaborating on a work, including original music, which is for and by neurodiverse people. In many ways it is a simple portrait of a place and its young, local residents, yet rather than being a film about neurodiversity, it is a filmed through a neurodiverse lens. By using overtly cinematic techniques, such as blurred edges and close-ups, the film reflects some of the experiences of neurodiversity, challenging the assumption that a neurotypical view of a place is the one true way to see, hear and experience it. Fundamentally, it also highlights how neurodiverse behaviours are celebrated in the work of Beckett and art more widely, but are not given that same value in everyday life.

The film raises questions about how places such as St Ita’s imprint on the landscape and the people who live there. Yet it largely ignores the hospital itself, instead choosing to focus on the surrounding landscape FIG.9 thus reordering the power dynamics of how disabled people interact and engage with that site. The ultimate fate of these sites remains to be seen: some have been abandoned, while others have been turned into immigration detention centres, but most have unclear futures, continuing to stand and holding their weight upon a place. In the meantime, the neurodiverse view of a landscape presented in Echo’s Bones offers a way forwards in how we begin to process the history of these sites, and how to do so by centring anti-ableist methods.

Portrane is only a few miles north up the coast from Baldoyle, which was home to a residential hospital for disabled children, as well as the disability activist Martin Naughton (1954–2016). Naughton was born in the Galway gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) town of An Spidéal and moved to Baldoyle in October 1963, aged nine, with his sister Barbara due to lack of support services in his home town at the time. A companion publication for TULCA includes excerpts of Naughton’s forthcoming memoir Never Know Your Place.7 Titled Day One, it chronicles Naughton’s journey to Dublin through a series of interviews conducted by Joanna Marsden in the eighteen months before his death. It conveys the excitement that accompanies such journeys for a child – the modernity of train tunnels and double-decker buses – but also some of the hardships. Naughton was a monoglot Irish-speaker and the memoir relays his fear and confusion of living in a highly regimented environment and unable to find linguistic common ground. Naughton had a nuanced relationship with Balboyle, returning to work there as an adult, after a period of travel in the United States, where he came into contact with the Boston Center for Independent Living. On returning to Ireland, he established the first Centre for Independent Living in the country, which played a key role in the early disability rights movement, advocating for access to living support and ensuring that disabled people could live autonomously, without the risk or threat of institutionalisation. Naughton also campaigned for the closure of institutions.

Having to move to access healthcare and support services is a familiar concern for disabled people. In the film Cabbage FIG.10 by Holly Márie Parnell (b.1988) one encounters an intimate portrait of her family as they attempt to move home to Ireland from Canada. Their move to North America a decade earlier had been prompted by the severe cuts to disability services during austerity in Ireland. The film is the result of a collaboration with Parnell’s brother David, who writes using eye-tracking technology, and includes the recollections of their mother, June. She recounts the low expectations that medical professionals had for David during the diagnostic process, to which she responded: ‘I don’t know how you can measure the essence of being human’. Footage of verdant landscapes, the sea, of bird song and close-ups of David in the sun FIG.11, watching YouTube or speaking to June, lend the film a calm poignancy. These scenes are intertwined with images of June rifling through the vast piles of paperwork detailing doctors’ opinions, many of which are dismissive of David’s chances in life – as June explains, there is a sense of ‘just writing him off’. David asks questions throughout the film, such as ‘does my body surprise you? Does my body inspire you? Does my body scare you?’. In a later scene we see a new wave of digital paperwork being generated in order to secure David the services he needs to return home. June wears a necklace with a Claddagh ring hanging from it, a symbol that is synonymous with a neighbourhood in Galway City, but which has also come to represent a sense of Irishness and home for those living abroad.

Cabbage relates, with profound clarity, how much David and his family long to return home to Ireland, but also how many barriers they face, as well as the feeling that they have ‘had to leave Ireland twice’ because of the lack of support. In this sense, the film is an account of the displacement of disabled people and their families due to austerity. At the same time, it is also a tender account of access to intimacy: ‘that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level’.8David and June share an intimacy around what he needs and wants, on a fundamental, emotional level. Filling out a report detailing David’s care needs to service providers in Ireland, June remarks ‘it’s hard to get that all across in little bullet form’, listing one of his requirements as ‘being outside, even late in the night looking at stars’. It is this basic but vital need – human right, in fact – for dignity and freedom, to simply be outside and look at the stars, which Cabbage is about. It is a stridently anti-ableist account of the violence of bureaucracy and the agency of disabled people.

The video-essay Forgetting Is The Sun FIG.12 by Rouzbeh Shadpey (b.1992) engages with the entangled relationship of family, state, medicine, history and memory. It juxtaposes footage from the artist’s grandmother – who remains silent during a Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), while counting a tespih (prayer beads) – with scenes from two films that challenge methods of remembering: The House is Black (1962) by the Iranian poet and film-maker Forugh Farrokhzad (1934–67) and Mémoire 14 (1967) by the Moroccan poet, film-maker and writer Ahmed Bouanani (1938–2011). It weaves together personal memory and collective history, recontextualising Farrokhzad’s and Bouanani’s defiance of state-sanctioned regimes of remembering through the lens of individual forgetting, and its resistance to the medical capture of the memory test. As a former practicing doctor, Shadpey has conducted the MoCA test many times in his career. By depicting the contingent relationship of health to the state, he questions the means by which memories are validated, and the role of the state in maintaining these institutional structures.

The film opens with scenes from The House is Black, which depict Bababaghi, one of two leper colonies in Iran, where the director spent twelve days in 1962. When asked how she gained the trust of those living in the colony, a crew member responded: ‘Forough lived, ate, sang, danced, slept, laughed and wept amongst them’. The institution of the leper colony acts as the ultimate site of medical exclusion and stigma, both practically and symbolically. Its occlusion from the state that created it, and from society more broadly, has led to an irreconcilability with its own identity that shrouds the institution even from itself. Shadpey highlights this by quoting a moment of simple humanity for institutionalised disabled people and the seemingly unimaginable act of human decency in Forough’s process. In sharing filmic space between a MoCA memory test and a leper colony, the film exposes the role of health and its treatment as a disguised agent in the formation of national memory, and by extension personal identifies. It positions medicine, often maligned as a secondary concern, within a system of power that shapes the makeup of the nation state and the myths it (re)tells about itself.

In the process of conducting research for the TULCA Festival, it became clear how few archives exist that contain first-hand accounts of disabled people, particularly institutionalised peoples and artists. Of those that do exist, many have been lost or sealed due to their status as medical records. In addressing this lack, the artist Jamila Prowse (b.1994) made Crip Quilt FIG.13, a large-scale, patchwork, textile quilt translating the individual and collective experience of disability. It includes contributions from the National Disability Art Collection and Archive, three new collated oral histories of disabled artists of colour and the artist’s own lived experience. Each square in the patchwork conveys a snapshot from the life of a disabled artist FIG.14. While making the quilt, Prowse found that the act of stitching helped to alleviate the symptoms of her disability, and her embroidered reflections took on a diaristic, confessional tone. Made on crip time – predominantly from bed – the quilt has been made intentionally heavy to reflect the use of weighted blankets in managing anxiety disorders and calming flare-ups and burnouts for neurodivergent people.9 

Quilted sections of text read: ‘One of the biggest barriers is unrealistic expectations of time’, ‘I moved my studio into my home and I started to work again’ and ‘When I got ill it forced me to reimagine the ways in which I could still make that art I want to make’. Within the tradition of quilt-making, weaving the everyday lives of disabled artists into a physical object makes such realities visible and also creates material memories, sharing the possibility and strategies of crip making with future artists. In the context of the glaring lack of archival material, Prowse’s preservation of experience and knowledge is nothing short of a gift.

As part of the work of addressing the legacy of ableism in the West of Ireland, a core tenet of the TULCA Festival is a commitment to accessibility, reducing access barriers for disabled, sick, chronically ill, Mad or d/Deaf audiences to participate in the festival. For the 21st edition this included captioning all films and providing audio description tours, which were conducted by the education team. Many of the exhibited films have audio-described versions and there were transcripts provided for sound works. There were plenty of seats and spaces to rest, and the accompanying booklet featured access statements to support audiences with their visit.

As a disabled person who grew up in Galway, I carry an embodied sense of the ableism of this place and its violent legacy. This landscape is loved deeply: its rocky hills, its frigid waters and its sodden fields. It will always be home, and in that there is a responsibility to look beyond the romanticism of its beauty. In addressing this carceral legacy and the often brutal treatment by the state of disabled people, honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise is an act of solidarity with all incarcerated peoples and a means to broaden our abolitionist perspective. It is a call for us to fully account for the legacy of eugenic policies to address ableism as a central vehicle of the carceral system and to centre disability justice within abolition.10 This dedication is an attempt to name that violence. In doing so, in understanding how its sinews stretch and pull, we might begin to unravel it, and bring forth a future that centres disability justice and eradicates the carceral institution, wherever it may sink its claws. 

Iarlaith Ní Fheorais is a curator and writer. She is currently the curator of the 21st edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. As a writer she has written for Frieze, Burlington Contemporary, Viscose Journal, Girls Like Us, and has an art and access column with Visual Arts News Sheet. She regularly contributes to public programmes and lecture, including at Somerset House, London; KW Institute, Berlin; Konstfack University, Stockholm; and Arts and Disability Ireland. Committed to anti-ableism in the arts, she is working on a free online access toolkit for art workers, to be published in 2023. 

 

1. ‘Ireland’s high committal rates which substantially outpaced those in England, Wales and Scotland and by the 1950s resulted in Ireland having the highest rate of psychiatric bed availability internationally’, B. Kelly: Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland, Newbridge 2016, p.2.

2. ‘[The asylums] functioned as vast, unwieldy social welfare system for patients and possibly some staff [so much so that] in 1907, 30 percent of admissions [for one Dublin asylum] came directly from workhouses […] which leads to the conclusion that the Irish asylum system was a social creation as much as it was a medical one’, ibid., p.2.

3. J. Wilde: Ancient Cures, Charms and Usages of Ireland, London 1890, p.34, quoted in Kelly, op. cit. (note 1), p.28.

4. According to Talia A. Lewis’s working definition, ableism is a ‘system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. This systemic oppression leads to people and society determining people’s value based on their culture, age, language, appearance, religion, birth or living place, ‘health/wellness’, and/or their ability to satisfactory re/produce, ‘excel’ and ‘behave. You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism’, T.A. Lewis: ‘Working definition of ableism’, talialewis.com (1st January 2022), available at www.talilalewis.com/blog/working-definition-of-ableism-january-2022-update, accessed 20th November 2023.

5. In 2019 Recess, New York, commissioned an accessibility guide geared toward small-scale arts non-profits and the potentially expansive publics these organisations serve. As set out in the introduction, disability justice ‘is the second wave of the disability rights movement, transforming it from a single issue approach to an intersectional, multisystemic way of looking at the world. Within this framework, disability is defined as an economic, cultural, and/or social exclusion based on a physical, psychological, sensory, or cognitive difference. Disability Justice movements understand disability to be unevenly distributed, primarily affecting black and indigenous communities, queer and trans communities, and low income communities. Disability is structurally reinforced by ableism, a system rooted in the supremacy of non-disabled people and the disenfranchisement of disabled people through the denial of access’, C. Lazard: Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice, New York 2019, available at promiseandpractice.art, accessed 24th October 2023.

6. C. Wills: ‘Life pushed aside’, London Review of Books 43, no.22 (18th November 2021), available at www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n22/clair-wills/life-pushed-aside, accessed 20th November 2023.

7. J. Marsden: ‘Day one’, in I. Ní Fheorais, ed.: exh. cat. honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise, Galway (various venues) 2023, pp.18–23.

8. M. Mingus: ‘Access intimacy: the missing link’, leavingevidence.wordpress.com (5th May 2011), available at leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link, accessed 21st November 2023.

9. See A. Kafer: Feminist, Queer, Crip, Bloomington 2013, esp. p.27.

10. ‘Disabled/neurodivergent people comprise just 26% of the united states population but represent up to half of the people killed by police, over 50% of the incarcerated adult prison population, up to 85% of the incarcerated youth population. Knowing this, we are left no choice but to view carcerality much more broadly, through a disability justice lens. If we fail to fill this gap in our collective consciousness, ableism will continue to be used as an excuse for inflicting violence upon marginalised people under the guise of care, treatment, and rehabilitation’, T.A. Lewis: ‘Disability justice is an essential part of abolishing police and prisons’, Medium (7th October 2020), available at level.medium.com/disability-justice-is-an-essential-part-of-abolishing-police-and-prisons-2b4a019b5730, accessed 20th November 2023.

Source: https://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/art...