Tulca 2012 Festival Catalogue by Aiden Kellegher

TULCA 2012, November 9 - 23 2012 Curated by Gregory McCartney

TULCA 2012

Board of Directors Vivienne Dick, GMIT Margaret Flannery, GUH Arts Trust Deirdre Kennedy, Sigmar Recruitment Galway Ann Lyons, Community Knowledge Initiative, NUI Galway Denise McDonogh, Visual Artist Maeve Mulrennan, Galway Arts Centre Alison Regan, 126 Artist-Led Gallery Joesphine Vahey, Galway County Library

Curator Gregory McCartney

A massive thank you to all the artists involved with this year’s Tulca; James C. Harrold, Marilyn Gaughan, Bernardine Carroll, Claire Doyle, Louise Duggan, Dr Chris Coughlan, Patrick Corbett, Tony & Angela Magennis, Russell and Eimear Hart, Kilcullen House, Brian Sheridan & Galway Harbour Company, Tom Sheridan & Bar 8, Live @ 8, John Hughes & Fairgreen House, Niall and Forster Court Hotel, Galway Arts Centre, 126 Artist-Led Gallery, Art Space Studios, Engage Studios, Oliver Niland, Gugai & the Róisín Dubh, Galway University Hospital Arts Trust, Conor & the Bierhaus, The Imperial Hotel, Chris Hurley & Cork Film Centre, Mary Deely & Galway Film Centre, CCA Derry, VOID Derry, Peter Richards & Golden Thread Gallery, LUX Distributions, Karen Demuth & Flowers Gallery London, Source Magazine, GMIT, Community Knowledge Initiative, NUI Galway, Dr. Christine Domegan, Marketing (J.E. Cairnes School of Business & Economics NUI Galway), the Arts Office NUI Galway, Fionnuala Gallagher and Deirdre Lydon, Angela Teahan Skills for Work (J.E. Cairnes School of Business & Economics NUI Galway), Mary McPartlan and Arts in Action and every single one of the Tulca invigilators and volunteers.

Administrator Fiona Hession

TULCA 2012, November 9 - 23 2012 Curated by Gregory McCartney

Technical Team Head Technician: Dave Callan Alwyn Revill, Matt Doherty, Tadhg Curran AV Technician: Aiden Reade Carpenter: Kevin McLoughlan Aula Maxima Technician: Cormac Staunton

Interns Co-ordinator Intern: Ramona Burke Marketing Intern: Vanessa Scanlon Public Art Assistant: Aimée Nolan Education Intern: Caitriona Cregan Volunteer Coordinator Intern: Sinead Axworthy Artist Liaison: Denise Manning

Marketing Assistants Jamie Gilmore, Sean Glynn, Eoin Greally

Festival of Visual Arts www.tulca.ie 087 069 4007 tulcafestival@gmail.com

Design pure designs

Printer Hudson Killeen

Education Assistants Tour Co-ordinator: Jane Gleeson Elizabeth O Brien, Alice Doran, Paul Gunning

cover image: Kraftwerk Jugend, Daniel Seiffert

TULCA 2012

Gregory McCartney’s question is thought-provoking and provocative, suggesting a change and sense of loss. 2012 is Tulca’s 10th year. If this question had been posed in 2002 the answers would have been strikingly different. Although there is a sense of looking back, McCartney’s programme is also about forming a critical position in the present. McCartney’s curatorial programme aims to give agency to the viewer while presenting a range of works from local and international artists. We are delighted to have new partners this year: Ealaíon na Gaeltachta and the Galway County Council Public Art programme. We also have continued support from partners on a local, national and international level. The three aims of Tulca: are to engage an Irish curator, commission new work and bring a critical and contemporary focus to the West of Ireland. These partnerships mean that even in a time of economic uncertainty, we can still achieve our aims. On behalf of the Tulca Festival of Visual Art I would like to thank you, our audience. Whether you have been with us from the start, just come on board with us or begun supporting us somewhere in the middle, Tulca exists for you. Thank you to our staff and volunteers who conjure Tulca up every year out of nothing but a vision, hard work and a lot of plywood. Thank you to our funders, who have supported us and believed in our vision for Tulca. Thank you to the artists, both this year’s and all of the artists who have participated in Tulca since the first festival in 2002. It is your belief in Tulca, your hard work and trust that has made our festival what it is today.

What Became of the people we used to be?

‘What became of the people we used to be?’ is a line from the theme tune of ‘Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?’ a BBC sit-com set in the general bleakness that was the 1970s. The line seemed to sum up the rationale behind what I wanted this year’s Tulca to become. It suggested puzzlement over where we were going personally and a lack of control over how our world has ‘progressed’. It also suggests a divorce from our dreams, from ourselves; something odd and a little surreal...

“I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then” Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

Imagine every time you made a decision a new universe came into being. Apparently it’s possible. There’s considerable difficulty it seems tying down how to accurately measure quantum material (the basic (and smallest) material of which the universe is composed) as it seems to react to being measured and observed and alters its form accordingly. This theory, known (after its creator, Werner Heisenberg) as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle was elaborated upon by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr who postulated that all quantum particles don’t exist in one state or the other, but in fact in every possible state at the one time. Another intriguing theory was forwarded by Hugh Everett who considers the object doesn’t change but an actual split in the universe occurs. When a physicist measures the object, the universe splits into distinct universes to accommodate every possible outcome. Everett’s ‘Many-Worlds’ (as it is called) interpretation has in theory consequences beyond the quantum level. If an action has more than one possible outcome, then -- if Everett’s theory is correct -- the universe splits when that action is taken. This holds true even when a person chooses not to take an action. So in principle there’s a Greg McCartney that didn’t write this… and there’s a ‘you’ that didn’t read it. That ‘you’ came into creation when you decided to pick this magazine up and has your memories but has a different, maybe better future. I wonder what that future is?

“I can’t explain myself sir, I’m afraid, because I’m not myself, you see” Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

This is undeniably all very sci-fi and of course it could be all rubbish but it’s true we are all at times haunted by the choices we made and the decisions we didn’t take. Fear haunts the pre-sleep landscape and the hazy justawake moments when we aren’t quite certain exactly who or what we are, when we seem to be between states and are momentarily convinced that we don’t belong in this world. I chose the Tulca artists because they all articulate or create a particular landscape; subtle little worlds (even if portrayed in an epic manner) that I hope will echo with the Galway viewer. The work can be read in many ways of course but I’m not really interested in taking a particular political position, at least not explicitly so. Rather I hope to present an opportunity for people to immerse themselves in the environments these artists create and take away something they can use from the experience. Maybe even the building blocks of a new universe.

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

Ackroyd & Harvey Duncan Campbell Nuala Ní Chonchúir Anne Cleary & Denis Connolly Ceara Conway Ruth Connolly Cecilia Danell Colin Darke Gerald Dawe Paul Hallahan David Hepher Patrick Hogan Joanna Karolini Jenny Keane Nicholas Keogh Susan Lynch Christine Mackey Lisa Malone Louise Manifold EimearJean McCormack Fiona McDonald Conor McFeely Siobhan McGibbon Nadege Meriau Megs Morley & Tom Flanagan Locky Morris Seamus Murphy Elena Näsänen Niamh O’Malley Aisling O’ Beirn Emily Richardson Kelly Richardson Gerco de Ruijter Daniel Seiffert George Shaw Gerard Smyth Pétur Thomsen Deirdre Walsh Brigitte Zieger 6

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

Public Art Installation in Connemara Inis Bearacháin

In the early summer of 2012, artists b Ackroyd & Harvey made a site visit to c the island of Litir Meallain in Connemara, Co Galway. The landscape made an impression. Wild coastal islands scattered with boulders, bungalows and deserted cottages seeping back to the land gave rise to an idea of planting a semi-mature tree through the roof of an empty building.

Arbeit UK, 2011, 39 minutes, B&W, Sound, Video

The living tree as a sculptural medium is figuring increasingly in the work of the internationally renowned artists; their History Trees artwork for the London 2012 Olympics is in progress: ten artworks marking key entrances to the park that act as a legacy of the east London site and will be fully completed in 2013. Currently, they are growing a few hundred oak trees germinated from acorns collected in 2007 from German artist Joseph Beuys’s famous artwork 7000 Oaks and in parallel are conducting a series of public engagements into the biological, cultural and climatic significance of trees. Here, in Litir Meallain the search for a property, facilitated by artist Ceara Conway, has led them to the abandoned island of Inis Bearacháin and a schoolhouse that has become the site of a work that deviates away from the physical encroachment of a tree through the building, but symbolically puts a root into the memory of place and invokes a legacy of family trees. The old schoolhouse, built in the 1930’s and last used by pupils in the 1960’s presents an intimate setting where the artists will create a series of unique photographic portraits. Grass grown from seed is the material of the artists’ photography; chlorophyll, the green pigment initiating a photochemical response is the primary medium, giving rise to images of a subtly evanescent kind. The seduction of visibility and the inevitability of change are implicit in Ackroyd & Harvey’s photographic work, and by skillfully manipulating grass’s properties and connotations, they articulate and actualise notions of ephemerality, duration and memory. In preparation for the exhibition, the artists will set up a temporary studio darkroom at Scoil an Cnoic, Tír an Fhia, which will be open to the public for special view on 3rd November. This new commission by the Tulca Festival marks a return to the west Ireland by the artists who in 1993 made a memorable installation Forcefield in the old McDonough Warehouse, Nun’s Island as part of the Galway Arts Festival.

“With old newsreels, photography and commercials, Campbell builds contrary tales of people, time and place, in which the picture is forever shifting depending on who is holding the camera. ...Arbeit sees the artist’s interests move from Belfast to Westphalia and beyond, examining the build-up to Europe’s current financial meltdown. As former head of Deutsche Bundesbank and an EU top dog, influential German economist Hans Tietmeyer’s story continually mushrooms from the particular to the epic, taking in Germany’s reunification, the introduction of the euro and the current crisis. Largely made up of black-and-white photographs, the film is held together by a narrator who speaks with the crusty, antiquated lingo of an ancient Oxford don. He is constantly struggling with his material: from the accounts of hack journalists leapfrogging “complex procedure” in favour of “crude caricatures”, to his own tendency to let hindsight colour his descriptions. What emerges is an obscure trail of figures, economic theory and personal anecdotes, which has nonetheless led to where we are now. Whether he’s making protean portraits of players or politicians, Campbell’s constant is the problem of navigating the past itself.” Skye Sherwin, The Guardian

Commissioned as part of Galway County Council’s Public Art Programme, Production Manager: Ceara Conway.

image: Ackroyd & Harvey, Tree House

image: Arbeit, 39 minutes, B&W, Sound, Video, UK, 2011.

Sculpture, photography, architecture and biology are some of the disciplines that

Arbeit courtesy of Duncan Campbell and LUX, London.

Duncan Campbell was born in Dublin in 1972. He completed an MFA at The

intersect in Ackroyd & Harvey’s work, revealing an intrinsic bias towards process

Glasgow School of Art in 1998 and lives and works in Glasgow. Recent solo

and event. Their artwork makes explicit connections with socio-political ecologies

exhibitions include the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2012), Belfast

by highlighting the temporal nature of processes of growth and decay in sites of

Exposed (2011); Artist’s Space, New York (2010); The Model, Sligo (2010);

architectural interest as well as contemporary art galleries and museums worldwide.

Tramway, Glasgow (2010); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2009); Ludlow 38,

They have exhibited/participated at London 2102 Olympic Park, London; Images

New York (2009); Kunstverein Munich (2009); MIT List Visual Arts Center,

Festival des Artes Visuels Vevey, Switzerland; Carbon 13 Ballroom Marfa, Texas;

Cambridge, Mass. (2009); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

NA! Academy dOCUMENTA, Germany; Festival of the World, Southbank Centre,

(2009); MUMOK, Vienna (2009); Tate Britain, London (2009); Baltic, Gateshead

London; Void Gallery, Derry; KHOJ International Artists Association, India; Terre

(2008); ICA, London (2008); and Art Statements, Art Basel 38 (2008), where he

Vulnerabili Hangar Bicocca, Milan; Earth Royal Academy of Arts, London.

was awarded the Baloise Art Prize.

www.ackroydandharvey.com

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

What Became of the People We Used to Be?

Entangled

What became of the hut we built into the side of the trees that lead to the mill race in the valley? The hut we would hunch inside with Bimbo who always stank of flea powder and mud. The hut we would make plans in, for adventures, while scoffing handfuls of sweets from Fassnidge’s. The hut was levelled, I suppose, and where it once stood is now a tangle of bushes, bushes from which badgers break at dusk. The badgers stop, test the air and run on.

And what became of Fassnidge’s? Its window still holds boxes of Cornflakes and biscuit packets but they are unreadable whiteouts now. And the old generation are gone; and the next have had to wrap up; and the generation after that probably don’t care for the shop their family built from very little at all. But that’s not it. Fassnidge’s was levelled, I suppose, by the shopping centre that sprawls half a mile away and offers more delights than a Turkish bazaar. We built that hut near the steel factory. What became of the steel factory, which was once a laundry, which was once a flax mill? It stands still but its windows are glassless and they gape like dead eyes out over the river. There is no more steel but there is enterprise: a potter throws her clay in one of the outbuildings, and a canoe-maker plies his trade in that flat-roofed warehouse snug by the riverbank. And what became of Joe Kelly who used to give us coppers if we would go up to Fassnidge’s for him, to buy Sweet Afton and other messages? Coppers for sweets. Joe Kelly died, of course, because that is the way of the old. And his house survived for a time on one side of the churchyard lane, a long cottage with a low slung roof. But Joe Kelly’s house was levelled too, to make way for boulders so that people could not park on that site where a man once lived. And what became of us, the people we used to be? A boy and a tomboy, who lit fires and swam in the river, who climbed and gathered and explored. Our lives were levelled too – we entered the flat landscape of adulthood where adventures are of a different sort. Neither of us live in, or even near, our valley anymore; you are raising daughters in Australia; I am raising my brood in the west of Ireland. And we are not the people we used to be. But that place, our valley, flows through us and, in many ways, we will always be the people we used to be. We will always be two children hunched in a wooden hut making plans, who, when they emerge, test the air and run on.

Situated in a tangled garden on the grounds of Merlin Park Hospital, the installation juxtaposes two parallel films (one for the left eye, one for the right eye). A tangled garden is cut back and cleaned up. Through one lens of a binocular vision viewing post, gardeners transforming a tangled glade into the manicured garden they see in front of them (tidy, but slowly returning to its natural state). Through the other lens, a ghostlike figure wanders through the untended glade.The installation experiments with stereopsis, narrative and time-displacement using two streams of video. The artists were introduced to the mechanisms that govern binocular vision by Dr. Pascal Mamassian of the CNRS in Paris: the convergence of what the left and right eye see; the great indulgence the brain has for conflicting information from the two eyes; the primacy of events over background… Entangled is about these perceptual conflicts and their resolutions. With thanks to the staff of Merlin Park Hospital and Tulca 2012 for their help and support. This stereoscope was initially created as part of the Landmark Public Art Programme, commissioned by Mayo County Council and funded by the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government under the Percent for Art Scheme. Created in association LaboratoirePsychologie de la Perception, Université Paris Descartes & CNRS. Further details www.connolly-cleary.com/Home/on_sight

Entangled by Cleary & Connolly Site specific binocular installation for Merlin Park Hospital. Steel, LCD video, front surface mirrors, achromatic doublet lenses. Dimensions: 44 x 33 x 144 cm Year: 2012 Binocular Installation by Connolly Cleary, with the collaboration of Dr. Pascal Mammasian of CRNS.

Made in Ballinasloe My body let loose your pool, pulsed until you were ready, thehindwaters came after like a following sea. You held up one arm – a greeting – ‘I am here.’ You were made in Ballinasloe; made of love in Ballinasloe.

You were made in Ballinasloe; made of love in Ballinasloe.

Our peahen, our leveret, our wisest of vixens, on the night you were born the husks of long-gone horses flickered across the fairgreen, the town was furred with moonlight.

We plucked you from all the babies who might have been born, to raise you in a place where the sky bleeds water, and the houses squat low. You were made in Ballinasloe; made of love in Ballinasloe. Nuala Ní Chonchúir

Award winning artists Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly live and work in Paris. They coined the term “observer participation” to describe their work, which is committed to affirming the active role of the viewer in a work of art. Exhibitions include: Farmleigh Gallery, Dublin (2012); The Barbican, London (2010); The Pompidou Centre, Paris (2009); Sesc Pompéia, Sao Paulo (2009); Yokohama Triennial, Japan (2005).

TULCA 2012

Iascéalaiocht

What Became of the people we used to be?

For this year’s TULCA, Ceara Conway has created an intimate storytelling performance event called Iascéalaiocht. On the night of the 10th of November, up to 15 traditional Curraghs will take to the sea off the coast of Litir Meallain in County Galway, each carrying a storyteller or performer and a small crew of listeners. This night-time trip will involve the telling and singing of local and international stories and songs. The artist received her inspiration for this event while happening upon across a character by the name of Eddie Ó Conghaile, a local folklorist and priest based in Tír an Fhia in Connemara. He spoke to her about remembering his father night fishing with his friends, telling stories in the boat and reminisced that he felt his father often went fishing as an excuse to tell stories. She is interested in both the experiential and visual nature of this performance, creating an experience for an audience that will feel magical and fun while imparting local knowledge, story and song in a very memorable setting. Listeners wrapped in blankets and darkness will be treated to a variety of carefully selected local, national and international storytellers and performers. The performances will be bi-lingual (Irish and English). This will be a ticketed event with a limited number of spaces. There will be a special bus leaving from Galway City to take participants to site of the event.

With Build Your Own: Scandinavian Loneliness “With Build Your Own: Scandinavian Loneliness, situated as a pile of harmless seeming boxes in the middle of the gallery’s floor, there are unusual connotations; ‘build your own’ incites a notion of mass-produced and masspossessed – if everyone has one, why shouldn’t you? And yet what we’re encouraged to construct is ‘loneliness’, and not only that but specifically Scandinavian Loneliness. With this direct tie to the artist’s biography and heritage we can’t ignore the outright personal dimension introduced.” (Sue Rainsford, Paper Visual Arts Journal)

See events on page 44 for details.

Ceara Conway is a Galway based artist with a background in visual, public, musical and participatory arts which respond uniquely to the people, place and context of each project she approaches. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and she has created art with people of all ages and backgrounds. Her ideas are expressed through permanent sculptural works, photography and performative events, where she is interested in creating public memory as a form of public art. She has been awarded a number of awards over the years, most recently the CREATE Artist in the Community Fund 2012 and the Paul Brady Music Scholarship at UL. She is recently returned from a three month Artist Residency with Suzanne Lacy in Los Angeles. image: Ceibh Litir Calladh Ceara Conway

“Why can’ t things stay the same?”

image: Why can’t things stay the same?, Ruth Connolly

This work deals with a part of Irish landscape not affected by the Celtic Tiger, but a side of life that has touched everyone at some point; the change of life and the inevitable loss of what was once an integral part of it. The humble bungalow pictured here, can be seen as the voice for the older generation of Ireland who has seen it all come and go. It has the feeling of an elderly man, once the head of the household, who has now become old, decrepit and no longer useful. “You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, as full of grief as age, wretched in both.” Shakespeare, King Lear.

“The shelter deep in the Scandinavian woods strongly resonates with our longing for an authentic way of life in harmony with nature. As the technology driven modernist’s dream has turned to dystopia, we seek once more our salvation in search for origin and an idealised relationship with nature.” Extract from ‘Unpacking the flat-pack’ by MichaëleCutaya

Ruth Connolly is a visual artist and photographer from Co. Galway, Ireland. Having graduated from

Cecilia Danell is a Swedish artist based in Galway where she is a member of Engage

Fine Art Printmaking in Limerick School of Art and Design in June 2011, Ruth went on to receive the

Art Studios. She has exhibited solo in the Talbot Gallery, Dublin and participated

Visual Artists Ireland Director’s Award 2011, for her degree show, “Private Thought, Public Spaces”. She

in numerous group and two-person shows, including Galway Arts Centre, 126

recently completed a part time course in Graphic Design and this September she has started an MA in

Gallery, Ballina Arts Centre and Solstice, Cork. Recent awards include the Tyrone

Photography at Central St. Martins College, University of the Arts, London. Her work deals with creating

Guthrie Residency Award and the 2011 Wexford Arts Centre Emerging Artist Award.

a common bond within society, by introducing a sense of empathy into the collective consciousness.

image: Build your own Scandinavian Loneliness, Cecilia Danell

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What Became of the people we used to be?

Approaches to the Old City Colin Darke’s work is primarily driven by history and his mostly text-based work contains references to significant historical moments and related political literature. Recently, he has focused on the Paris Commune of 1871, combining direct reference to the still-life paintings made by Courbet, while imprisoned for his part in the revolution, with writings related to the event. In speaking about his work Darke has said: “I believe his paintings of apples allude metaphorically to the massacre of 30,000 Communards by government forces and my apples refer directly to this and to other acts of state infamy”. Arise contains the first line of the original French version of The International, written in response to the Commune. Petroleuses contains a quotation from Jenny Marx, writing about government propaganda which labelled Communard women as indiscriminate arsonists. Red Flag combines images of Paris in 1871 and 1968.

The flat in Abbeygate Street was up an alley between a boutique and the Roaring Twenties pub. For its day, in the early 1970s, it was quite spacious given what was generally on offer in Galway city to the slowly burgeoning population of university students, nurses, young professionals and the floating number of visitors who never left – drifters from a previous time whose lives seemed in some magnetic attraction, earthed to the city, without any visible means of financial support or sign of a day’s (or night’s) work. Others - barmen, actors, street photographers, visitants, musicians, perpetual students, stall holders, Army cadets, ones ‘in from the country’, student medics, civil engineers, and those ‘doing a B.Com.’ – all shared a life of Riley in the Cellar Bar, the Tavern, the Skeff’ and the Castle Hotel, myself included. Supping up the summers, which did seem to stretch into late October, and covering up our heads when the drenching rains swept in off the Claddagh basin and drifted along the canal-ways to be met with downpours drifting in along the Corrib into Newtownsmith and the Salmon Weir Bridge, life was good. I spent some time at this particular interface, above the Court House, in what was then the City library, reading 19th century Irish novels and memoirs, and slipping off in my mind’s eye into the streetscape down below – the small but elegant bridge, the eel nets and traps, the racing waters, and the calm canal bank, literally under the window of the reading room. Occasionally a swan would glide by out of the ordinary ebbing light of a winter’s afternoon. The imposing Cathedral looked so imperiously out of place in this wonderland.

Colin Darke, originally from England, has lived in the north of Ireland since 1988. Following twenty years in Derry, he is now based in Belfast. His work references political and economic theory and more recently the relationships between art and significant historical events. image: Petroleuses, Colin Darke

These few streets, approaches in to the old city, where my true first belongings and beginnings, when I left Belfast in 1974, aged twenty-two, they became my home during the seventies. I grew up there, an inner landscape as much as a neighbourhood: The Four Corners, Lynch’s Castle, Market Street, Abbeygate Street, upper and lower, as far as Woodquay, its perfect little park, the rowing club and those magnificent railway pillars – symbols of high summer. Not a home from home, but my new found land. There was Jimmy Cawley who sold clothes second-hand, his mighty Chaucerian face atop a Crumby coat and heavy scarf, beamed through the murky morning light; the undertaker who would recite at the drop of a hat the death scene of Dicken’s Little Nell; the humane Heaney brothers whose butcher shop kept the wolf from our door on a couple of occasions; the little shop that only two people alone could stand up in, and of course, the original Sally Long, who emerged from behind a door to the long low bar like a figure out of the mythological past. The shops were homes as well which meant that when we all surfaced after the streets were aired. We had at least that in common – we lived together: an unpredictable mosaic of lives and histories who shared a very old part of the very old port and market town of Galway. It could have been Genoa as far as I was concerned. The romance never ended. Nestled within the city walls sat St Nicholas Church with its solitary trees and lopsided gravestones and railings, the wonderfully named Bowling Green where Nora, Joyce’s girl had stayed, and on the site of a Convent (so I was told) The Connacht Tribune (‘The Try-bune’). extract from: The Stoic Man: Poetry Memoirs

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

Come Fly With Me “I think of myself as a landscape painter and as I live in the city, I paint the city. I try to achieve a balance between the physical materiality of the buildings and the painted appearance of them. An interaction between the rough cast concrete and net curtaining and the stories that can be told by the ‘found’ graffiti and scribbles on the walls. I use photography for information but also enjoy the challenge of it. How can figurative painting compete with the camera except by attempting things it can’t do, making the experience very physical + ‘hands-on’, laboured even, in contrast to the universality of photographic imagery in all its different forms? Scale is important, I like the experience of standing in front of a painting to be physical, theatrical even; I’ve always admired scenic artists. I’m often asked whether I intend the paintings to be political, to which the answer is NO! Of course I can’t avoid that interpretation but for me they’re just the landscape. I paint them because they’re there! If I lived in the mountains, I’d paint the mountains, if I lived in the sea, I’d paint the sea.” Ben Geoghegan’s visual art practice intends to accommodate and privilege disparities and complexities within identity and collectives, using photography as an expression of curiosity and participation in broader fields of everyday life, a means of looking widely into the world. Entitled Come Fly With Me, this printed image was chosen for this year’s Tulca from thousands of photographs and after many explorations into the genre of Landscape made over the past ten years. It serves as a motif for the present conditions of Ireland’s health service, and more broadly of the economic and social conditions of a society coping in ‘crisis’.

Ben Geoghegan is a Galway based Visual Practitioner, working from Artspace Studios. CoFounder of 126 - Galway’s Artist Run Gallery, Ben has exhibited in many and various contexts from a young age. Educated in Galway, London,

image: Three Trees, David Hepher

Glasgow and Dublin, he completed a Masters in Visual Art Practices in 2009. image: Come fly with me, Ben Geoghegan, 2012

Extinct like us Extinct Like Us is a video work comprised of three songs covered by a fictitious band made up of three Giant Pandas. The work is a performance of three songs, Nature’s Way by Spirit, No Matter What by Lou Barlow and Home Is Where You’re Happy by Charles Manson. Over the past hundred years the loss of species has become a major topic globally, yet we lose many species a year despite our concern. The Giant Panda has become the species we most recognise as an image for the conservation of wildlife, yet the reality of their long-term survival may only lie in zoos, mainly for our ease of mind and entertainment. The work looks at how we may be concerned with the faith of many other species in the future, without thinking of how they can become ‘the canary in the mine’ for our own survival.

Paul Hallahan is an Irish artist based in Kildare. His work is largely based in the medium of video and involves looking at the relationship between man and his surroundings. Between 2009 and 2012 he founded and ran Soma Contemporary Art Space in image: Extinct like us, Paul Hallahan

Waterford city.

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

‘Zarathustra’s Scale’

On one side of a scale Zarathustra placed the idea of three existing evils – on the other side he placed three heavy answers. Thus Spoke Zarathustra – F. Nietzsche

Joanna Karolini concentrates to accentuate the idea of the infinitely dissimilar; nature’s strict patterns and forms in their constrained simplicity; and the human obsessive activity to classify and register the abnormalities and the infinitely dissimilar. It could be said that the sharp edges in Karolini’s crystal landscape are a reminder that with transformation comes revaluation, and with revaluation comes uncertainty and fear, hence the comfort to be found in tradition. The thousand broken crystal shards spread over a lit surface do not give the reply or proposition to the ‘heavy answers’ but serve as a meditation on the transformative power of the individual. Zarathustra’s Scale is a physical landscape in itself and an indicator of absence; a representation of something else, something that is missing. We can either focus on this absence, this deformity, this empty space where something should be or we can celebrate the ‘wholeness’ of the fragmented; the beauty of new form and new landscape. We are never satisfied with the landscape that we inhabit. Perhaps that is part of being human. There is always perceived room for improvement, no matter how negative the improvement is, hence the human race has a history of war stretching through the centuries. We capture the past and attempt to keep it and turn it into a landscape that matches our contemporary desires and needs. We use historians, archaeologists and archivists to give us a theoretical justification for the nature of the landscapes we create. We generally don’t use artists as they (thankfully) uncover the spuriousness of our attempts at immortality (think Shelley in Ozymandais) and instead often privilege the trivial, seemingly unimportant but ultimately the most vital.

Patrick Hogan’s partly autobiographical photographs present an intimate view of his everyday encounters and surroundings in a remote area of County Tipperary where he has lived for the past two years. His compelling portraits, dense still lives, brooding interiors and pensive landscapes convey a sense of uncertain anticipation and quiet foreboding. Though modest and focused in geographical scope, Hogan’s powerful images explore expansive existential themes of love, fragility, decay and loss. In making this work, Hogan lets go of any traditional notions of photographic documentation and narrative. Working instead with an intuitive openness and sensitivity to the world around him, his work unfolds in direct response to his ongoing encounters with the people and the landscapes of his locality. Rather than attempting to offer some notion of ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ about a particular place or person, Hogan uses the camera as a tool to explore the uncertainties and ambivalence of photographic representation. At the heart of the work is a questioning of whether it is possible to develop a meaningful visual understanding of his intimate and immediate world.

Patrick Hogan is an Irish artist. He is the winner of the Gallery of Photography Artist Award 2012. He was nominated for the Prix Pictet Photography Prize 2012 and short-listed for ‘Hey Hot Shot’ International photography competition 2012: Aesthetica Magazine Creative Works Competition 2012 and the 3rd Ward

b.1978, Joanna Karolini’s practice evolves around context, space and situation,

Gallery Winter Solo Show Award 2011. Hogan has taken part in two international artist residencies in Iceland.

creating site-specific installations and the necessity to make sense of marginality

His work has been published in a number of international photo magazines and publications including Burn

and the un-noticed. Associate Lecturer in photography and founder of Belfast

Magazine, Prism Magazine, The Shot and most recently with the London based photographic collective

Rainskirt Company. Karolini studied photography at Manchester Metropolitan

Uncertain States. He will be exhibiting in Ireland and abroad during the coming year.

University, 2002, and Master of Fine Arts at University of Ulster, 2004. image: Untitled 028, Patrick Hogan, Lambdachrome Print, 122 cm x 151 cm.

image: Crystal detail, Joanna Karolini

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

Galatea

A Removal Job

Jenny Keane’s practice is focused on the word ‘horrific’. Visually, her work deals with society’s fascination with horror films – yet rather than being a fan, Keane’s interest in horror stems from the negative representation of the monstrous female body, and the subversion of these depictions. Through video installation and performative drawings, her work explores different layers of monstrosity in an attempt to investigate the dichotomy between fear and desire, its relationship to language and connection to the (female) body. Keane’s practice focuses on concepts of abjection and liminality alongside the idea of compulsive repetition, a pause or loop that subverts the constructions of narrative. Galatea is a new double channel video installation based on the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. Interpreting Pygmalion’s literal desire for his sculpture, Keane contemporarises the myth and translates the marble carving into the most debased image of the feminine – the sex doll. Alluding to, yet reversing traditional Ophelia imagery, this submerged and lifeless object is sporadically inflated to its anthropomorphic form in an attempt to subvert phallocentric binary oppositions. The video editing and double channel screens fragment and (de)construct this monstrous ‘body’, thus endeavouring to create a liminal moment.

Nicholas Keogh’s new film A Removal Job commissioned by The MAC celebrates the camaraderie of a group of workers, and the unspoken exchanges between them. The action takes place at a traditional two up two down red brick terrace house in Belfast. The movements of the workers are at first erratic and violent; only after an understanding of each of the characters has been established is order restored. Their movements are subtly choreographed producing a seamless flow of objects, slotting perfectly into a skip. The resulting work is reminiscent of the classic 1990’s computer game Tetris. Keogh is based in Belfast and his previous work includes the construction and sailing of a gondola/ bin boat along the Grand Canal in Venice. The boat was made from an industrial wheelie bin, bathtub, washing machine and other recycled materials and was part of Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2005.

image: Galatea, Jenny Keane.

Jenny Keane (Co. Clare, 1984) is a visual artist based in Belfast. She studied for her BA at Limerick School of Art

Double channel video installation, Production shot, 2012.

image: Demolition still, Nicholas Keogh.

Nicholas Keogh was born 1977 in Newry, County Down and currently lives and works in Belfast. Keogh

and Design, Limerick, (2002-2006), and her MFA at the University of Ulster, Belfast (2006-2008). Keane recently

graduated in 2000 with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art in Context from the University of The West of England, Bristol.

completed her PhD in Fine Art at the University of Ulster Research Graduate School (2008-2012).

Keogh’s recent work includes ‘a film about blue bottles, documenting shooting blue bottles with a 10 gauge shot gun. His previous work includes the construction and sailing of a gondola/bin boat along the Grand Canal in Venice as part of Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2005.

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

Treading Myths

Ecological dispersals

On reading J M Synge’s The Aran Islands Lynch began to explore the notion of places and people that no longer exist. ‘The Arans’, an outcrop of Co Galway, have always held an allure for the artist–this rugged place exposed on all sides contrasts greatly with the sheltered country side where she grew up.

Ecological Dispersals relates to the migration of plants and biological organisms that reposition themselves in a new context with the possibility of redefining a habitat from one of neglect to one of diversity [which also serves as a metaphor for human movement]. In this respect context is re-scribed as a social environment – in constant flux, agitated by human presence and interaction with the ‘other’ – whether turning the page of a sketch-book, searching for microscopic patterns or engaged with people mediated through conversation. Using walking as an explorative and investigative tool – Mackey takes this notion of migratory diversity to investigate the movement of plants on a walk route through her participation on ‘SIDEWAYS’ – an interdisciplinary walking-arts festival in Belgium. Following a meshwork of footpaths, alleys, tracks, back-roads and ‘desire’ lines, Mackey undertakes a 100km route from Brussels to Turnhout in four days, carrying a mobile studio on her back. This multi-media installation connects the transitory movement of people, whilst experiencing the landscape on the ‘go’ recording a range of conversations with artists and botanists.

For Lynch the walks on Aran develop a physical connection to the landscape and an understanding through encounter and conversations of the reality and mystery of this way of life. This work treads the myth of the people who lived on Synge’s Aran and maps a line through that which no longer exists.

Christine Mackey is an artist and independent researcher who employs diverse disciplines, subject matter and tactics in devising works that can generate different kinds of knowledge of place, their hidden histories and ecological formations. Using diverse graphic sources and quasi-scientific methods her work explores the interactive potential of art as a research tool and its capacity for social and environmental change. www.christinemackey.com image: Ecological dispersals, Christine Mackey.

Susan Lynch lives and works in Belfast where she recently completed her MA in Art in Public. Lynch undertakes large scale walks as part of her public art practice with the ambition to create an opening for the unexpected to happen.

image: Untitled, Susan Lynch.

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

Metronome

Shot Frontier It looks like there’s been an accident, some criminals have escaped... The work reveals an intimate view of the world and asks questions about our place in it. It revolves around structures, containment and people’s interaction with each other and the landscapes they have created for themselves. Little anonymous people are moving in different ways, people are falling off out of control, clambering, searching for themselves in a precarious existence or not moving at all, their uncertainty echoed in the brooding sky. There is a darkness in the vision, but this awareness of the dark side doesn’t allow it to overshadow everything. Two figures have found a way to clamber onto the open spaces beyond and above the structures and the hook swings quietly like a perpetual pendulum.

“ruins make us think of the past that could have been and the future that never took place” Svetlana Boym

Lisa Malone works at Flaxart studios, Belfast, exploring and experimenting with her

Manifold looks for visual forms of storytelling, and explores the artist’s role in deconstructing narrative within lager pools of collective thought. Her current practice explores human fascination with decay, and the folklore and cultural significance surrounding it. Over the last nine years, Manifold has worked with abandoned and decayed spaces as settings for works in photography and video. The steady increase in the number of derelict spaces found in both the urban and rural landscape, have contributed to a peculiar rise in human fascination with the architectural ruin. Svetlana Boym applies the term Ruinophilia, to describe the human relationship and fixation with the ruin in the 21st Century–“ruins make us think of the past that could have been and the future that never took place”. Shot Frontier depicts an abandoned space in the West of Ireland. It was originally exhibited in Chicago and over the course of its display, an altercation occurred outside of the gallery space, resulting in a stray bullet hitting the work by accident, puncturing the image through the scene’s broken window. The irony of the event, stirred her interest in what occurs, when work becomes damaged or changed through circumstances beyond personal control: the narratives that are generated through accidental damage, and how this renders visibility on a new level and within new contexts. Like the architectural ruin, it occupies a space between the imagination’s projection upon the image site, and the physical space itself. Damage shares a position of being a point of production of lost potential, absurd histories and humorous fictions.

practice using the mediums of print, sculpture and kinetic elements. Solo exhibitions include: Metronome, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast 2010. tiny open spaces, La SalaNaranja, Valencia, Spain 2006. We’re All The Same Now a site specific installation

Born in Co. Galway, Louise studied at Central St Martins College London, and GMIT, Galway. She has

at the Crumlin Road Gaol, 2009 (two people). Selected group exhibitions: Futures,

exhibited extensively throughout Ireland and internationally at ISCP, New York, Proximal Distances

Elephant, Los Angeles, America, Drawing a line, Ministry of Propaganda, China,

Chicago, Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm, Red House Arts Centre Syracuse, New York, Candid Arts

Diverse Realities, Martha St. Studio, Winnepeg, Canada, Revolving Ambiguity, The

Centre, London, 411 Galleries Shanghai, China. She has been a recipient of awards from Arts Council of

Grove Gallery, Downpatrick and Art in Evolution, Espacio Carmen, Valencia, Spain.

Ireland, Culture Ireland and Galway City & County Councils. Louise is currently based in Galway and is a

Represented by Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast. www.lisamalone.net image: still from Metronome, Lisa Malone.

image: Shot Frontier, Louise Manifold, Digital archival print, 2012

member of Artspace Studios.

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

Firmament

GIFT SHOP

As an artist EimearJean McCormack utilises traditional print processes as well as expanding hybridised and alternative techniques incorporating photography, mixed media and sculpture. This series of screen prints, entitled Firmament, draws inspiration from the open plane of vast natural environments, manipulating perspective with ubiquitous patterns, reflective flats and geometric man-made structures.

GIFT SHOP expands on the political aspect of McDonald’s art practice by proposing alternative considerations of economic exchange through inviting the public to participate in the act of ‘gifting’. Cut from three standard sheets of birch plywood with no waste and occupying one-ninth its floor area when not in use, GIFT SHOP is also an exercise in material and spatial efficiencies and challenges current high levels of consumption and waste.

EimearJean McCormack graduated in 2007 with an MA in Fine Art Printmaking from Camberwell College of Art, University of The Arts London. Her work has been exhibited widely across Ireland as well as New York, Philadelphia, London, France and China. image:, Firmament, EimearJean McCormack five colour screen print on opal.

Fiona McDonald situates her practice at the interface between art and architecture. Making site-specific architectural interventions, functional objects and film McDonald attempts to expand our awareness of socio-economic development associated with place and explores the potential inherent in alternative considerations of space, materials and economic exchange. She has a Bachelor of Architecture degree from University College Dublin and an MA in Visual Arts Practices, Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin. image: Gift Shop, Fiona McDonald, 2440mm x 2440mm x 2440mm; Timber, mixed media gifts; 2012

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

Weathermen projects

Neoplasm McGibbon’s work derives from an obsessive fascination with the extraordinary, in particular the study of teratology; the analysis of perceived abnormalities in the natural world, both real and imagined, such as Congenital Hypertrichosis Languoniosa, a condition where the body is covered with Langua hair. McGibbon is engrossed by the body’s ability to morph itself almost beyond human recognition. Conditions such as neoplasms, genetic mutations caused by abnormal proliferation of tissues dominate the artist’s practice. The artist delights in the thought that the vessel in which we live in is capable of developing these mammoth forms that almost consume oneself. The artist marvels over the human capability to survive and accept the body we are born with. McGibbon’s work explores society’s interpretation of conventional anatomy through the study of social psychology, the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others. Through her investigation the artist questions the future of “normal”. Image Neoplasm, Influx, 2011, Wax, human hair, found object

Siobhan McGibbon is a visual artist based in Dublin city; she graduated from GMIT in Galway in 2009 and since then she has exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2011 her work was exhibited in Dublin Contemporary, Ireland’s first international biennial. In 2010 she had her first solo show in Takt Berlin. She has exhibited in group shows and performed as part of Knee-jerk, a social interactive collective throughout Ireland, including Link culture festival, Influx, Occupy space, Galway Arts Centre, Block T, Basement project space, and 126 artist led space. McGibbon has sat on the board of 126, artist led space, Tulca Festival of Visual Art, Engage studios, Adapt Galway and is a founding member of Knee-jerk art collective. image: Neoplasm, Siobhan McGibbon.

Shown for TULCA 2012 are extracts from the Weathermen projects in the form of video and audio sequences. The Weathermen projects draw upon an interest in a history of arcane references including “the weathermen” a clandestine revolutionary party in the 1960’s and 1970’s for the violent overthrow of the US government and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. They famously aided the jailbreak and escape of Timothy Leary. It is a landscape of the interior as much as the exterior of human experience as structured by diverse forces from the meteorological to the personal and the social. Conor McFeely’s works have an emphasis on the manipulation of space and the idiosyncratic use of materials and media. The contexts for these works have been varied and include references to literature, cinema, art history and social contexts amongst others. He has been referred to by the Guardian newspaper as a twenty-first century electro-alchemist. His work which has often been informed by cult literature, has also been described as jump cut rather than linear, and been likened to a diatribe, more from the lips of Mark E Smith than William Burroughs, a sort of post-punk diorama. Recent shows include The Cologne Video Art Festival, CologneOFF 2012 and The Night of the Long Knives (Weathermen projects) as part of an AIR Residency at NKD Dale Norway, 2012. image: Weathermen Projects, Conor McFeely, 2012.

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

“When we eat a potato, we eat the earth and we eat the sky” John Stewart Collis

“My current practice investigates our relationship to food and the connections between eating, dwelling and belonging. Worms literally digest their burrows. The foetus feeds off the womb, and more generally human beings feed off their natural and cultural environment. Recent works explore the metaphorical riches of foods that are deeply rooted in western culture such as bread and potatoes. As part of the Nightshade family, potatoes were originally considered as poisonous and linked to magic and witchcraft. They were not mentioned in the Bible, which made priests highly suspicious. To herbalists who believed that the appearance of a plant was an indication of the disease it could cause or cure, potatoes resembled a leper’s gnarled hands, and the idea that they caused leprosy became widespread. Later in history potatoes saved hundreds of soldiers and farming families from famine, only to plunge others into starvation with the advent of the blight. My Solanum Tuberosum works also look at the sprouting potato as an embodiment of nature’s dynamic processes. The work of the tuberous nightshade is secretive, yet so prolific that it is reborn in a multitude of vigorous tubers. The potato produces a rhizome of shoots and roots from its nodes, making contact with life underground. Before we know it, constellations are born”.

Nadege Meriau is a London-based French artist working with edible materials and photography. She studied at the Royal College of Art and was recently nominated for the Arles Discovery Award 2012. Recent Shows include FFWE at The Photographers’ Gallery, London 2012, Prix Decouverte, Arles 2012, Brighton Open’11, Phoenix Gallery, Album, Liverpool Biennale 2010, Exposure, Format Festival, The Quad, Derby 2009, Curious Nature, Newlyn Art Gallery 2008 and Bloodmoi at Rotterdam City Museum 2007. Nadege is currently an artist in residence at the Florence Trust, London.

image: Solanum Tuberosum I, Nadege Meriau, 2010.

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

‘Aughty’

image: Still from, Went the games well? by Seamus Murphy

image: Aughty, Tom Flanagan & Megs Morley. HD Digital. Film Duration: 1:21:00.

Aughty is a feature length experimental documentary by visual artists and filmmakers Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley. Over a period of 18 months, the artists have explored the Aughty mountain region, its hinterlands and people, a vast and unique geographical area that spans East Galway and East Clare. The film is constructed as an “arrangement of incidents” alluding to a more fragmented narrative experience whereby meaning is constructed through the observation and interpretation of the encounter of place and journey, recording the incidental moments, actions and gestures encountered.Through observation and engagement with this unique rural region, the film captures the complex relationship between the place, the landscape and the people at a time where the degeneration and regeneration of traditional rural communities and the impact of modernisation on rural society is reaching a pinnacle moment. The film also features an original score from Galway musicians Phantom Dog beneath the Moon and Caoimhe Morley, alongside traditional music scores by musicians in the Aughty region. Aughty was commissioned by Galway County Council’s Public Art Programme as part of ‘Aughty Public Art Projects’ curated by Áine Phillips. Morley and Flanagan both studied Fine Art Sculpture in Limerick School of Art and Design before completing Masters in Visual Arts Practice at IADT, in 2008. Their work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in both gallery and film festival contexts. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: The Good Children Gallery, New Orleans, Sept 2012 (Solo), RencontresInternationales: Paris: Centre Pompidou November 2011 & Berlin July 2012., “A Series of Navigations” (Group Show) The Model, Sligo, April 2012, Galway Arts Centre, June 2011(Solo) Public Commissions include “Aughty” a feature length film commissioned by Aughty Public Art Projects and Galway County Council, premiered on 21st July 2012. Upcoming: Alchemy Film Festival, Nov 2012, CCA Derry (Group Show) 2013, Mermaid Arts, Wicklow: (Solo Exhibition), 2013.

image: Locky Morris, Acid Free, Empty Rennie packaging, 35mm slide trays, wall lights.

Dimensions variable 2007-2009. Courtesy of Mother’s Tankstation.

Went The Games Well?

A Week in Goals

When Britain presents herself, sells herself, to the world, history seldom plays wall-flower. After all, doesn’t Don’t Mention the War do just that? Her Olympic athletes are Team GB, a modish brand that has one halfexpecting an Italian Job-era Michael Caine to appear. What with the empire now well and truly gone, to out-spin Tony Blair, the past can only get better. Even the Queen proved game and became a Bond-girl. East-Enders, those proud survivors of Adolf’s nightly raids and London’s champion gripers, responded cheerfully to the international invasion. Some of their old bombed-out neighbourhoods now host the futuristic arenas that gave us the games in London, 2012.

Morris’s practice as a visual artist working in sculpture, photography, sound and video is often triggered by what he calls ‘daily epiphanies’. Subjects for the work range from just about anything - a neighbour’s dog, his daughter’s first day at school - to broader social concerns. His varied output over the last ten years has drawn heavily on personal narratives, chance occurrences, and the rituals and banalities of family and everyday life, often incorporating an element of humour. A constant thread over the decades is the idea of one’s ‘immediate landscape’. This is an art of assemblages consisting of ‘absurdist banalities that, through careful staging and cumulative thematic hypnotism, becomes visual poetry... It’s art that’s as touching as it is deceptively simple-minded’ (Robert Clark in the Guardian).

I found a poem written by the so-called father of the modern games, Pierre de Coubertin, Ode to Sport. Parts of this ode should make even the IOC blush, though I suppose they can mercifully point to Jesse Owens. De Coubertin is right up there in the opening credits of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia. I got a friend with a voice, part Ealing comedy part vintage Winston, to recite excerpts from it. Locky Morris was born in Derry where he continues to live and work. Throughout his early career, Morris’s engagement with Derry City and the political landscape of Northern Ireland was critical to his work. From the mid 1980’s onwards his ‘socially embedded and locally attuned’ output was often shown in high profile exhibitions such as the British Art Show touring Britain (1990) and New North (1990) and Strongholds (1991) at the Tate Gallery Liverpool, while also being exhibited in such places as a

As the games raged, and a genuine bonhomie settled on the city, I was happy to try to capture the meanwhile in London. One lingering question for Boris though - who forgot to invite Austin Powers?

disused bookmakers, community centres and small shops. Morris also made music in the late 1990’s with the band Rare. He has exhibited widely both regionally and

Seamus Murphy directed 12 Short Films by Seamus Murphy, a series of films for P.J. Harvey’s album Let

internationally, with recent solo and group exhibitions at the Golden Thread Gallery,

England Shake. (http://www.youtube.com/user/letenglandshake) He has recently finished Angelus, a project of

Belfast, MannheimerKunstverein, Germany, The Model, Sligo and Apexart and White

still photographs of America that he began in 2005, to be published as a book next year. He is about to begin post

Box, New York. He is represented by Mother’s Tankstation in Dublin.

production of a screen version of Angelus.

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

The Spell

Island

Elena Näsänen’s video The Spell reminds us of a still photograph or a painting. In the video an elderly princess has fallen asleep in a middle of a tea party. All the guests are also sleeping heavily. They are seated as if they were on a stage. The candles are off. Roses have dried into the vase. Mist floats around.

Island was shot on a lake island in Ireland called Lough Derg. This remote location, a pilgrimage destination for centuries, is a site of distance and discipline. The structure of the video corresponds to the natural momentum of the island–an intuitive choreography of rhythm and repetition. The shots are empty of people but evidence a solid and substantial construction of place. The video explores a kind of drifting memory as the camera tracks silently past a montage of scenes. The imagery is reduced to its most basic tonal properties of black and white and projected onto a large screen covered in black cloth. The view is periodically obscured by black screens which were positioned in front of the camera to provide interruptions or intervals. These gaps serve as markers to structure the discontinuity; the effort to capture a symbolic space in fragments.

The prince has not arrived. The princess has not been kissed and she has stared to get older. On the other hand, this video scene or a tableau vivant could be seen as a metaphor of present time. A party goes on as long as they have their eyes shut. Director, Cinematography, Editing: Elena Näsänen. Production Assistant: SannaKarlström. Composer: Sami Klemola. Cello: Sami Klemola (Villa LillKalvik 21.10.11). Sound Mastering: PekkaSassi. Color Grading: Petri Falkenberg / Grade One. Princess: Tuula Hyyryläinen. Young Lady: Sanna Sirkiä. Ladies-in-waiting: Anita Viljamaa, Pirkko Talvio-Jaatinen. Orchestra: JuhaPykäläinen, TaneliRantala, JarmoLuoto. Around the table: JanneLastumäki, SuviLeinonen, Hanna Westerberg. Special Thanks: Vuosaarenkesäteatteri.

Elena Näsänen (b.1968) is a visual artist who works with film and video installations. She has studied in The

O’Malley born 1975, Co. Mayo, Ireland. Lives and works in Dublin and is represented by Green on Red Gallery,

Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and The Slade School of Fine Art in London. In her works she combines

Dublin. She has exhibited extensively and recent solo exhibitions include: 2011: Green on Red Gallery. 2010:

elements from traditional cinema to video installation. The sound is always essential in her works.

Centre Culturel Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, Centre CulturelIrlandais, Paris, Gaain Gallery, Seoul, South Korea. 2009: Void, Derry, Northern Ireland, GalleriFlach-Thulin, Stockholm, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin. 2008: Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Contemporary 2011, Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, Germany, Maria Stenfors, London, ArgeKunst, Bozen Italy, Kenworthy-Ball, Zurich, Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, GalerieBaumet Sultana, Paris, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, Palazzo dellePapesse, Siena, PS1, MoMa, image: ‘Island’ 2010, HD DVD projection, 8min 13sec loop,

image: The Spell, Elena Näsänen.

Black Polycotton Stretched over Plywood, 5m x 2m x 30mm (variable).

New York. Her work is included in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin City Gallery and the Arts Council of Ireland.

Commissioned by Centre Culturel Monterhermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, 2010.

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

Crucible and Structures Invisible to the Naked Eye

Over the Horizon

The animations Crucible and Structures Invisible to the Naked Eye are part of this body of work. The animation Structures Invisible to the Naked Eye was made during a series of ‘show and ask’ conversations about various astronomical structures which shared similar structural features with researchers at Armagh Observatory Crucible and was developed by looking at the activities of two major scientific institutions in Boulder, Colorado which monitor the invisible, telling us more about the nature of space than place. The Space Weather Prediction Centre monitors space weather, particularly solar activity, providing predictions and advice as to how it may effect navigation and satellite communication services globally. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is charged with advancing measurement sciences and houses one of the most accurate Cesium clocks in the world, enabling precision timing in the relay of satellite information. Aisling O’Beirn’s work is concerned with how to explore space as a physical structure and as a political entity. O’Beirn has been making and animating forms relating to observed and theoretical structures being studied by contemporary astronomers and physicists. This work, much of it facilitated by Armagh Observatory, is an extension of previous work on the politics of place.

Over the Horizon takes its name from the failed radar system developed on Orford Ness during the Cold War. The building that housed it and its ariel field are now used to broadcast the BBC World Service to Europe. The film revisits the site of a previous film, Cobra Mist (2008), and explores through photographs and sound the memory of a place, remnants of its history, looking for evidence of stories, true or rumoured. Orford Ness is a site with a long military history and much of what took place there is still under the Official Secrets Act. During the Cold War part of the site was an Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, the buildings of which have been left to the elements to deteriorate, creating a tension between the time it will take for their secrets to be revealed and for the buildings to disappear. The place has a sinister atmosphere, which the architecture itself speaks of. The film records the physical traces of the site’s secretive past. Emily Richardson’s films explore landscapes and environments to reveal the way that activity, movement and light are inscribed in place. Traversing an extraordinarily diverse range of landscapes including empty East End streets, forests, North Sea oil fields, post-war tower blocks and Cold War military facilities, her films offer a dazzling deconstruction of place and time. They focus the mind and eye to detail, finding transcendence and emotion in the everyday.

image: Crucible, Aisling O’Beirn.

Over the Horizon, sound recordist and composer: Chris Watson Thanks to The National Trust. Made with support from Arts Council England

O’ Beirn has exhibited nationally and internationally including participation in The Nature of Things, 51st Venice Biennale. She has been involved in many artist run activities including Flaxart Studios. Aisling O’Beirn is represented by The Third Space Gallery.

Richardson’s films have been shown in galleries and at festivals internationally including the Wapping Project, London (2011), Arprojx Cinema att TheArmory Show, New York (2011), FACT, Liverpool (2011), Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London (2009), Danielle Arnaud, London (2009), WürttembergischerKunstverein, Stuttgart. (2007), Uppsala Museum, Sweden (2007), and Venice, Edinburgh, London, Rotterdam and New York film festivals. She was awarded the Gilles Dusein Prize, Paris, 2009 in recognition of her films.

image: Over the Horizon, HD Video, 20 minutes 2012. Dir/Prod/Camera: Emily Richardson

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

Leviathan

Leviathan, a largescale triple-channel video by Kelly Richardson, is a “20-minute loop of footage shot on Caddo Lake in Uncertain, Texas. The video displays the area’s indigenous bald cypress trees in their swamp environment. However, Richardson digitally enhances the composite image by colour grading the water with undulating ribbons hued a glowing yellow green and replacing expected nature sounds with an ominous soundtrack. Utilising the format of a triptych, the landscape is presented from a single vantage point, like a painting set into motion. Richardson’s manipulation of the video suggests several foreboding plot lines: the birth of primordial life, the emergence of an evil aquatic creature, or a post-apocalyptic Earth. The title itself (Leviathan) alludes to several textual references including a serpent sea monster from the Bible who is the gatekeeper to hell, Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 philosophical treatise, and a 1989 sci-fi film of the same name. These references become particularly relevant in the wake of environmental atrocities including the 2010 BP oil spill and, most recently, the earthquake and impending threat of nuclear disaster in Japan. Employing postmodern intertexuality, Richardson draws on the tradition of Leviathan as myth and metaphor encouraging the viewer to meditate on the possibilities of the implied narrative.”

image: Kelly Richardson, Leviathan, 2011 HD three-channel video installation, 48’ x 9’ Originally commissioned by Artpace San Antonio. Image courtesy of the artist and Birch Libralato.

Kelly Richardson draws on science-fiction cinema, literature and the history of landscape painting in works that interweave fine art, animation, real footage of spectacular natural wildernesses and Hollywood special effects, to create highly sophisticated and immersive works that are realised over several months and sometimes years. Her work has been included in numerous contemporary art biennials including Beijing, Busan, Gwangju and has been acquired by major museums including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (USA), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (USA), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Canada) and Art Gallery of Ontario (Canada). Her work was selected for the Toronto International Film Festival (2012), Sundance Film Festival (2009 and 2011) and was honoured for her contribution to the visual arts at the Americans for the Arts National Arts Awards (2009). Born in Canada, she has lived and worked in the UK since 2003.

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

Almost Nature

No One ‘Round Here Knows You

The landscape in the Netherlands is fully man-made. Nature itself does not exist. What we could call nature has been planned on drawing boards. It exists only at the mercy of mankind. Space is scarce so everything is planned: farming next to greenhouses, next to recreation areas, next to suburbs. The series Almost Nature is made at a conifer’s nursery in Boskoop, the Netherlands. It’s a vast field of little plants, carefully arranged to fill up the space economically. All these little plants are clones; each colour descends from the same source. They resemble the photographic pixel. Gerco de Ruijter is a photographer based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands working in the field of aerial photography. His photography is not shot from planes or helicopters but with the aid of kites and fishing poles. This low level aerial photography, with the lens pointing straight down, allows him to capture familiar landscapes in a rather abstract way. There is no accumulation of different objects towards the horizon. In this photography the horizon is absent. There is no foreground, no background and only a few references to scale.

No One ‘Round Here Knows You, are paintings of one particular scene all from the same view point (which is not to say the same point of view!) at different times of the day and times of the year. I began making the paintings after discovering photo after photo of the place. I had little memory of taking the pictures and yet I had done so time after time. There is some futile attempt at summoning significance and conjuring meaning out of familiarity. In the end it is as fruitless as trying to hold onto a dream; even if it is a dream of nothing much really. I have encountered art all my life almost entirely through reproduction. A sad admission, but there you are. Not being much of a traveller or for that matter much of a pilgrim I’ve come to live with it. This is how I came across the work of Peter Dreher, namely his series of paintings called Tag um Tag Guter Tag or Day by Day is a Good Day. I don’t recall where or when exactly but since my first encounter with his image of a solitary glass of water and the revelation that he has been painting this same object in the same place since 1974 I have been haunted by their presence in the world. I warmed to their simplicity, their quiet absence of ambition. Though clearly about the very world we live in, each painting seems to be a turning away too. And though only 25 x 20cm each seems to re-start and then re-conclude time. When I think of these paintings I’m reminded of that remark of Poussin’s quoted in T J Clarke’s wonderful The Sight of Death, “I who make a profession of mute things”. These paintings have found a way into my nervous system and taken their place among the tools I use to feel my way around the world. I finally got to see a number of them exhibited at The Approach in London a few years ago. It wasn’t a life changing moment. There was no epiphany. No great revelation. They were paintings of a glass of water. I liked them all the more for hardly being there. In an age when being known is its own epitaph what I really fear is being buried without knowing anything. I should at least know one thing well, something by heart perhaps. And if I have to think what that one thing is or might be then I will know that my heart is empty. Listen to D H Lawrence in his short story, The Man who Died, “It was the life of the little day, the life of the little people. And the man who died said to himself: ‘Unless we encompass it in the greater day, and set the little life in the circle of the greater life, all is disaster’”.

image: Almost Nature, Courtesy Gerco de Ruijter and the ZicZerp Gallery, Rotterdam.

George Shaw was born in Coventry in 1966. He studied at Sheffield Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. Recent solo exhibitions include; I Woz Ere at The Herbert, Coventry, UK (2011), The Sly and Unseen Day, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and The South London Gallery, London (2011), Looking for Baz, Shaz, Gaz and Daz, Void, Derry (UK) 2010 and Woodsman, Wilkinson, London, 2009. Shaw was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2011. He has an exhibition planned for The Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin in 2013.

image: No One ‘Round Here Knows You.,George Shaw. Humbrol Enamel on Board. 295 x 220 x 50 mm.

“The big city’s got nothing on friends. Three are still left around Finsterwalde, holding their own in the parking lot and watching the cars head south. Behind the field after the game, the evening belongs to the curtains. And the forest keeps silent, and then after a while everything quiets down.” From the song Finsterwalde by Jacques Palminger & Erobique The southeast corner of the German state of Brandenburg. An important industrial region during GDR times, the area is gripped today by recession, unemployment and population decline–a process that manifests itself in the urban landscape of towns like Finsterwalde, Hoyerswerder and Lübbenau and in the social relationships there. How do young people grow up in a place whose population is constantly declining as it ages? Over the space of a year, Daniel Seiffert documented the effects of this disintegration in the lives of Lübbenau teenagers whose personal evolution often runs counter and sometimes in direct opposition to the developments in the place where they live. The kaleidoscope of images he produced there revolves around the volatile state of flux between adolescence and adulthood, a frequently addressed theme in art. His images are pervaded by a universal sense of reflection and new beginnings, one that is even palpable in the small towns of East Germany. image: Kraftwerk Jugend, Daniel Seiffert

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

THE MYTH OF WHO WE ARE

Live@8 TULCA Moving Image Night

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood And sorry I could not travel both… The familiar opening lines of Robert Frost’s old favourite, The Road Not Taken, have profound meaning for those who, at a certain age and sitting among their souvenirs, look back and wonder about those engines of regret, the what ifs and what-might-have-beens. Such attempts at trying to fathom the unknowable can of course be dangerous. We should remember what happened to Lot’s wife when she looked back. Better to keep in mind Piaf’s Non, je ne regrette rien or Yeats’s declaration in Dialogue of Self and Soul: “I am content to live it all again”. But of course being human we cannot resist imagining the unlived life that might have eluded us or from which we have been separated by an accident of birthplace or family. At some time on some street corner we spot our double, our doppelganger and wonder whether he or she has been leading that life, the one that might have ours, could have been ours… if only. For those for whom this riddle becomes an ache or obsession, it would be comforting to believe that Derek Mahon is right when he says that: Somewhere in the heaven Of lost futures The lives we might have led Have found their own fulfilment. Or could it be that the real truth lies in these lines by another poet, Samuel Menashe: What I have not done Made me who I am. We are not necessarily born with our stories, because at certain moments in our lives most of us become different people. Lucky ones might early on encounter the teacher who changes lives. Or we sail off course, make one mistake, turn a corner, cross a bridge, misread the sign at the crossroads and become lost, maybe swap one illusion for another ( and life offers a wealth of illusions ) or we meet someone who leads us down that road in the yellow wood but not the one towards which we might have strayed ourselves alone or with another and different companion. Very often there is no conscious decision involved in the direction we take, we are the habitués of a specific time, swept along by invisible forces, good luck or bad luck, desire, sometimes by war, revolution or famine. Through the haze of the dreamy summers of our youth, when we are forever young and invincible, we don’t usually see – or even wish for - some destiny ahead. We might choose life lived out of context, the mysterious ways, the lazy ways – and many are attracted by them – or we might follow the carefully plotted map handed to us as part of a birthright or inheritance. Place and circumstance, missed opportunities and arbitrary events – and do I hear someone say our free will as well? – conspire to create the mosaic of our lives. And so when we look back and see ourselves all we have are memories and imagination and the shock of recognition when we are confronted with the familiar stranger in the mirror, or one of the versions of ourselves we turn from when we glimpse it: a subject I have been exploring in some recent poems:

Works include: Kenneth Anger (USA):

Eauxd’artifice

(1953, 16mm, 12mins)

Graeme Gussin (UK):

Spill

(2006, 16mm, 14 mins)

Rebecca Meyers (USA):

Blue Mantle

(2010, 16mm, 34 mins)

Rebecca Meyers (USA):

Lion and tigers and bears (2005-2006, 16mm, 12 mins)

Michaela Nettell (UK):

Garden

Samantha Rebello (UK):

Forms Are Not Self-Subsistent Substances (2011, 16mm, 23 mins)

Samantha Rebello (UK):

The Object Which Thinks Us: Object 1 (2010, 16mm, 7 mins)

Jean and Pierre Villemin (FR):

ContesParadoxoux

(2011, DVD, 21 mins)

Jean and Pierre Villemin (FR):

Oiseau de nuit

(2012, DVD, 9 mins)

(2011, DVD, 3.48 mins)

MYTH OF WHO I AM These works engage with amplifications of detail, postlapsarian eulogies, and medieval sensibilities, which explore acts of perception and acts of consciousness of and within the natural world. It is a selection of moving image works, predominantly from recent years, which engage with elements of natural landscape, of seascape, of the cultivated natural world of the garden and the creep of the natural world within an urban wasteland. But ultimately these works do more than explore images of elements of the natural world; these works revolve around the central concern of an exploration of the ‘perceptual moment’ and its relation to the moment or act of consciousness: there is a potential within these works, as artist Samantha Rebello has put it, for thought to take place within the very construction of film itself.

image: Still from Garden, Michaela Nettell, 2012.

Curator Declan Sheehan is a curator for Void Gallery, Derry, and for projects including Portrait of A City for Derry UK City of Culture 2013 and Artlink Residencies at Fort Dunree.

She has lived so long with the myth of who I am. Through the month of May blossoms, the time of year for shooting stars and winter sun. Through dark October evenings in the theatre, starstruck by Hedda Gabler and King Lear. Addicted to the minor chords, the cadences of sadder songs I was the river-man who knew the river’s origin, who seized the chance to be a dreamer on the river’s banks; a dreamer in the gallery where I stood rapt before the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt. She has lived so long with the myth of who I am: bearer of poet’s cramp, one who never tanned in the almost blissful heat of foreign countries.

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

Imported Landscape image: Imported Landscape, Pétur Thomsen.

“In the year 2003 The National Power Company of Iceland started the building of the 700 MW Kárahnjúkar Hydroelectric Project in eastern Iceland. The project consists of three dams, one of them being the highest in Europe, and a hydroelectric power plant. The dams block among others the big glacial river Jökulá á Dal, creating the 57km2 artificial lake Hálslón. The power plant is primarily being constructed to supply electricity to a new aluminium smelter built by Alcoa of USA in the fjord of Reyðarfjörður on the east coast of Iceland. The artificial lake and the constructions have spoiled the biggest wild nature in Europe, making the Kárahnjúkar project, not only the biggest project in Icelandic history, but also the most controversial one. There have been a lot of debates about this project. Environmentalists are fighting for the preservation of the wild nature while those supporting the project talk about the need to use the energy the nature has to offer.The best way for me to participate in the debate was to follow the land in its transformation. Since the beginning of the project in 2003, I have been going regularly to the construction site, taking landscape photographs, showing Icelandic contemporary landscape”.

Born in 1973, in Reykjavík, Iceland Pétur Thomsen has in recent years attracted attention, both in Iceland and abroad for his projects, “Imported Landscape” and Umhverfing, both of which deal with man’s attempt to dominate nature - man’s transformation of nature into environment. He has received numerous awards and prizes. In 2004 he won The 10th LVMH young artist’s award. In 2005 he was selected by the Musée de L’Élysée in Lausanne for reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow. The exhibition Imported Landscape in the National Gallery of Iceland was selected as the exhibition of the year 2010 in Iceland. Pétur Thomsen is Chairman of FíSL, The Icelandic Contemporary Photography Association,www.fisl.is

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

image: Bewildered, Brigitte Zieger

Down the Liffey Walsh’s work is an investigation of the structures and infrastructures which facilitate our lives. Through the examination of the built environment she explores its psycho-geographical effects. The integral geometry of the built environment is examined, and the everyday basic structures are manipulated and reconstructed. Walsh exaggerates and re-configures these structures in order to build images that convey the sense of wonder and vertigo that we face in the urban landscape of today’s world. The physical process of creating each piece reflects the construction and evolution of the urban landscape. This landscape is full of tension between order and disorder and Walsh’s work focuses on this, creating images of landscapes that struggle against themselves.

image: Down the Liffey, Deirdre Walsh, Mixed Media on Paper, 2012.

Dee Walsh is a Dublin based artist. She graduated with a Fine Arts Honours Degree from Carlow Institute of Technology in 2009. Dee has travelled extensively and applies this experience in her work by examining and drawing from various landscapes and architecture. Her most recent body of work is based on Dublin City. Dee has exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Bewildered Brigitte Zieger develops an oeuvre which, in a subtle manner, undermines aesthetic forms and decorative patterns. She employs a whole range of media, such as drawings, cut outs, video and sculpture. Though her works initially appear ideal and harmonious, this perception slowly falls apart upon closer examination – explosive charges lurk everywhere. The artist bases her works on world events and the way in which they are perceived and conveyed by the media. She collects motifs online, uses press photographs from newspapers and television news, and incorporates these in her diverse “displays”. In the animated tapestry Tank Wallpaper, the pastoral motifs turn into surfaces from which movement is dangerously extracted by a tank that eventually is aiming at the viewer. There is a heartening effect of this unexpected animation and formal attack, on a kitschy bucolic vision of the world, that importantly conveys the oxymoron between the domestic comfort of wallpaper and its ability to be used as an output for social and political messages. The new video Bewildered plunges us in an infinite panoramic view in the heart of a variety of imaginary forests such as the colonial period, liked representing them on its ornamental wallpapers. No human presence, but banners and other slogans abandoned here and there, vestiges of striking protests of the history of the last decades. So are condensed two utopias of different times and opposite ideologies, and proposed is this strange image of the lost paradise, or to come. Brigitte Zieger is a German artist, living and working in Paris. The Wallpaper series has been displayed at the Museum of Pully (Facing the Wall, with MUDAC Lausanne) as well as the National Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei (the Digital Hand). Her works have been shown internationally in numerous exhibitions such as Abracadabra at the Tate Gallery London, Prop Fiction at White Columns New York, Bang! Bang! at the CCA KunsthalleAndratx in Mallorca, Fabulations et Vagabondages at the Contemporary Art Centre Villa du Parc in Annemasse and this year Tirs Reloaded/Pacific Standard Time at the Here is Elsewhere Gallery in Los Angeles.

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

Friday 9th November

Saturday 17th November

Saturday 10th November

Tulca Opening Reception 8pm

Ceara Conway

David Hepher Talk

Tulca Festival Gallery, Fairgreen House, Fairgreen Road, Galway.

After party

9.30pm

The Forster Court Hotel, Forster St, Galway. www.forstercourthotel.com

9th - 24th November 2012

ACKROYD & HARVEY Public art

Inis Bearacháin A site specific work by Ackroyd & Harvey

Iascéalaiocht A storytelling performance by Ceara Conway

Bus pick up point: Galway Cathedral Car Park. €5 for bus. Location: Ceibh Paddy Jeaic, “Paddy Jack’s Pier’’, Leitir Meallain/Foirnis, County Galway. Bus Departure Time: 4.30pm. Return to Galway by 8.30-900pm. Limited spaces for his event. Please phone: 086 449 3088 to book your place on the bus/ boat stating whether you have a preference for stories in Irish or English. Please dress for outdoor weather, waterproof jackets with hoods, gloves and warm clothes. Life jackets will be provided.

Opening Days & Times:

Tuesday 20th November

Thurs,Fri, Sat: Sundays:

screening of ‘Aughty’ by Megs Morley & Tom Flanagan Followed by Q&A

10.00am - 4.30pm 2.30pm- 4.30pm

Saturday, 10th, 17th, 24th of November: Buses leave from Galway Cathedral Car Park at 10am and 1pm. €5 for bus. To book a place on the bus and for the boat (if not travelling by bus) please phone: 086 449 3088 All other days: Thurs, Fri, Saturday, Sunday: To book your place or group please phone: 086 449 3088

OPEN STUDIO & ARTIST’S TALK: Saturday 3rd November: Open Studio: 10-12pm for anyone wishing to view the work in progress and to meet the artists, Scoil an Cnoic, Tír an Fhia, County Galway. Artists Talk: 2pm-4pm: Ionad Pobail Leitir Móir, Tír an Fhia, Leitir Móir, County Galway (beside Church in Leitir Móir).

Tuesday 6th November School visits: See website www.tulca.ie

Sunday 11 November th

10:30am – 6pm

Source Magazine as part of Tulca Location: NUI Galway, The View. The editor of Source Magazine is interested in meeting with photographers and artists who are working on new photographic projects. This is to look at photographic work for consideration for publication as part of ongoing research and to provide feedback on work in progress. If you are not familiar with Source it can be seen online at www.source.ie Source is a photography magazine based in Ireland and distributed internationally. It publishes a wide variety of work including Documentary and Gallery based projects. To take up this opportunity with Source Magazine: Meetings will be arranged after a selection process from work emailed in advance. If you are interested in showing new work you should email up to 6 screen resolution jpegs - approx 400k max per image - and a two paragraph description of your work. Alternatively you can email a link to a specific project on your web site. If you have an initial enquiry email john@source.ie. Work should be emailed by 29th October.

Friday 16th November

6pm

126 Artist Run Gallery, Opening Reception

Screening, then Q&A with Megs Morley & Tom Flanagan, Tulca curator Gregory McCartney and Tulca Chairperson & Galway Arts Centre Arts Officer Maeve Mulrennan. Location: Nun’s Island Theatre. Aughty Screening @ 7pm Q&A @ 8:30-9:30pm

Tuesday 20th November

Time:3pm

Sunday 11th November

ACKROYD & Harvey Public Art Talk Location: NUI Galway, Aula Maxima.

Time: 1pm

Monday 12th November

Kelly Richardson Talk Location: Cluain Mhuire, GMIT White Room.

Time: 3.30pm

Tuesday 13th of November

Photography Panel Talk Nadege Meriau, Patrick Hogan and Daniel Seiffert. Location: NUI Galway, Aula Maxima.

Wednesday 21st November

8pm

Declan Sheehan presents… Live@8 Tulca Moving Image Night Bar 8, Dock Road, Galway City. Works include: Kenneth Anger (USA): Eauxd’artifice Graeme Gussin (UK): Spill Rebecca Meyers (USA): Blue Mantle Rebecca Meyers (USA): Lion and Tigers and Bears Michaela Nettell (UK): Garden Samantha Rebello (UK): Forms Are Not Self-Subsistent Substances Samantha Rebello (UK): The Object Which Thinks Us: Object 1 Jean & Pierre Villemin (FR): ContesParadoxoux Jean & Pierre Villemin (FR): Oiseau de nuit

Friday 23rd November Henry Street, Galway from 9:30pm. Featuring NUI Galway DJ,Colin Finnegan.

9.30pm

Venue: Galway Arts Centre Duration: 3 hours, 1-4pm Visual artist Cecilia Danell will be running a one-day workshop for teenagers on diorama model-making. She will talk about the importance of model-making in her own practice and show examples of her work in which she uses materials such as twigs, matchsticks, fabric and cardboard to create model landscapes. The participants will then be given time to make their own model landscapes using a range of materials, which will be provided on the day. The artist will assist and offer advice on how to make use of the materials at hand in order to realise each individual’s own ideas. The workshop is free of charge but limited places are availabe, so early booking is advised! Contact: TulcaWorkshops@gmail.com

Exhibition Tours Time: 6.30pm

Exhibition Tour: 1pm* & 4pm. * 1pm tour led by Tulca Curator on 17th November only.

School Tours Limited places, contact Jane: 085 1385746 or e-mail: TulcaTours@hotmail.com

Thursday 15th November

9:30pm

Aughty features original sound tracks by ‘Phantom Dog Beneath the Moon’. Aaron Hurley is a singer and song writer of avant folk and spectral gazing music. A native of Galway, he has just returned to Ireland after five years in England, to live in Cork. In collaboration with Scott McLaughlin, Aaron has recorded music under the name ‘Phantom Dog Beneath the Moon’, releasing ‘The Trees, the sea in a lunar stream’ in 2010 and ‘Through a Forest Only’ in 2007, both on Rusted Rail. He also co-founded the outsider folk outfit Cubs, who released the ‘The Whispering Woods’ also on Rusted Rail in 2011. Both projects are ongoing and exciting recordings have begun on new albums. Aaron has also collaborated, recorded and performed live with both Agitated Radio Pilot and United Bible Studies. He has previously played and recorded with Starglow and Snowmachine. http://soundcloud.com/phantom-dog http://www.facebook.com/pages/Phantom-Dog-Beneath-the-Moon

Build your own diorama (for teenagers)

Saturday 10th & 17th November

Mapping Workshop for teenagers with Visual Artist Susan Lynch

RÓisín Dubh Upstairs Phantom Dog Beneath the Moon (aka Aaron Hurley)

closing reception

7pm

Location: NUI Galway, Aula Maxima.

Saturday 10th November

Inis Bearacháin. A site-specific work by Ackroyd & Harvey. Tulca Festival Gallery, Fairgreen House, Fairgreen Road, Galway. 126 Artist Run Gallery, Queen Street, Galway.

Location: Galway Arts Centre start point Time: 4:30pm The workshop will use modern technology to help map a space. Text messages will be used to describe the path/route. When the group return from the walk they will plot their route on a map which they will draw, rewriting the messages with times and dates pin pointing where they were and what they were doing at that moment. The end result will be a map/drawing of conversations and an image showing the walking. It will reveal the participants’ thoughts while moving through space and the positions of those responding to them. Those responding to the text messages will be the group’s audience without ever seeing them, imagining the participants perspective from their own position.

Niland Gallery, Merchants Road, Galway. Nuns Island Theatre, 23 Nun’s Island, Galway. Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominic Street, Galway. The Shed, Galway Docks. Bar 8, Dock Road, Galway. Merlin Park Hospital, Dublin Road, Galway. A site-specific work by Cleary & Connolly. The University Art Gallery, The Quadrangle, NUI Galway.

Thursday 15th November

Artist Talk for Teenagers with Visual Artist Paul Hallahan Location: Galway Arts Centre Time: 6pm Visual Artist Paul Hallahan talks to teenagers on Video art.

Saturday 17th & Sunday 18th November

MOULD making workshop for teenagers Location: Galway Arts Centre Time: 2-5pm Beginners mould making workshop with visual artist Siobhan McGibbon. This two day workshop will look at visual artist Siobhan McGibbon’s use of mould making in her own practice and teach the participants to do a two part plaster mould. This workshop will also give some demonstrations on different mould making techniques. The workshop is free of charge but limited places are available, so early booking is advised! Contact: TulcaWorkshops@gmail.com

Wednesday 21st November

The Interview Location: White Room in GMIT Time: 4.30pm Tulca curator Gregory McCartney is interviewed by Tulca Chairperson and Galway Arts Centre Arts Officer Maeve Mulrennan.

TULCA 2012

What Became of the people we used to be?

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126 Artist Run Gallery, Queen Street, Galway.

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Duncan Campbell Colin Darke Cecilia Danell Gerco De Ruijter Ben Geoghegan Patrick Hogan Christine Mackey Fiona McDonald Nadege Meriau Locky Morris Elena Näsänen Aisling O’Beirn Daniel Seiffert Pétur Thomsen Dee Walsh Brigitte Zieger

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The Arts Council of Ireland strives to develop the arts by supporting artists of all disciplines to make work of excellence while promoting public access and participation within the arts. The Arts Council encourage engagement in the arts by demonstrating and facilitating the important contribution the arts make to the social and economic well-being of Ireland.