Your Custom Text Here
Seanie Barron dressed as An Poc Ar Buile (The Mad Puck Goat), c1970
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
Cover: Salvo, Untitled, 1987
Beyond Survival School Bus: AUDIO TOUR (2024)
Léann Herlihy
Beyond Survival School Bus: AUDIO TOUR (2024)
Audio Cassette
52’ 51’’
10.2 x 6.35 x 1.27 cm
€15
Beyond Survival School Bus: AUDIO TOUR (2024) is an audio tour with a pedagogical discourse that spans from eighteenth-century hedge schools to twenty-first-century school tours. Departing from the urban sphere and commencing its voyage deep into the mountains, the school’s curriculum explores the polemic effects of ‘self-perseverance’ through the social practice of survivalism; moving through examples such as an assimilated ‘outdoor’ swimming pool situated in a 15-story underground survival bunker designed for those who hoard economic wealth, to skimming the surface of open resources available from online prepping communities. Delving into the lack of depth within these social movements, the narrator, Ranger Herlihy, forewarns of the damaging effect of implicated de-prioritisation of collective scale action—that is, the point at which preparing for the potential risks brought about by environmental, economic and/or societal damage supersedes the more important task of advocating for structural and revolutionary change.
Intended for either a long drive across country or as a pedagogical tool to disrupt lecture halls & reading groups, this audio tour utilises the scripted nature of reality survival shows and provides a participatory script to each listener and invites them to take up a single role spanning from Doomsday Prepper alumni, ‘Warrior’ Martin to ‘eco crusader,’ Al Gore.
Beyond Survival School Bus: AUDIO TOUR (2024) is adapted from a 90-minute free bus tour performed in 2022 at Dublin Fringe Festival and adapted for an audio tour for TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2024. Beyond Survival School Bus: AUDIO TOUR (2024) was kindly supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.
Audio, text and design by Léann Herlihy
Photographs by Niamh Barry
TULCA at Dublin Art Book Fair | 21 Nov - 1 Dec 2024
TULCA is excited to be part of the 14th edition of the Dublin Art Book Fair, taking place at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and curated by Adrian Duncan.
This year, TULCA is showcasing a selection of recent publications, including:
The Salvage Agency, edited by Michele Horrigan
honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise, edited by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais
XVIII - Stories of TULCA, edited by Michaële Cutaya
there’s nothing here but flesh and bone, there’s nothing more, edited by Eoin Dara
The Law is a White Dog, edited by Sarah Browne
For DABF 2024, Guest Curator Adrian Duncan presents his theme Fictions: The makings of other worlds; offering ways to explore the theme through a selection of nominated books and a series of talks with invited guests.
Dublin Art Book Fair continues until 01 December 2024.
Michele Horrigan; Star Wars Man, by Seanie Barron.
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
New Publication: The Salvage Agency
TULCA Publishing is pleased to announce the release of its latest publication as part of this year's TULCA Festival of Visual Arts programme.
The Salvage Agency considers the agency and role of art in contemporary ecology and environmental action. Galway, on the edge of the northeast 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. These are paths taken by our collective society in the shaping of today’s world and a contemporary Europe.
This publication acts as a reader for the exhibition and public programme, giving further insights into the processes and intentions of The Salvage Agency and its various contributors. Novelist and playwright Walter Macken’s short story The City, written in the early 1940s, finds Galway casting aside humanity’s desire for accumulation and riches, instead revealing a place that is of the earth, and of all lifeforms that inhabit it. Catching up, decades later, with Macken’s vision has been central to The Salvage Agency. How can we critically inform ourselves and act within the repositioning that society must now undertake in the ecological epoch ahead? How will authentic dwelling manifest itself, and what are the tenants for an egalitarian realisation of the making of place? I thank all the contributors to this year’s TULCA for whom this is an urgent undertaking.
Publisher: TULCA Publishing, Galway
Publication: November 2024
Texts: Michele Horrigan
Copyeditor: Joanne Laws
Design: Pure Designs
Printed on 120gsm / 250gsm Offset
Edition of 500
This publication has been produced on the occasion of the 22nd edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, The Salvage Agency, curated by Michele Horrigan.
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is supported by The Arts Council, Galway City Council and Galway County Council.
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The Salvage Agency
Curated by Michele Horrigan
1-17 November 2024
Galway, Ireland
Photo: Mary McGraw.
