Artist Talk: Rachel Garfield | ATU Galway City
TULCA is pleased to present the Artist Talks Series as part of the 2026 programme, Veruca Salt, curated by Sinéad Keogh. Continuing its ongoing partnership with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will present four talks throughout October and November 2026.
The series invites audiences to engage directly with participating artists and the curator, offering insights into their practices and the ideas shaping this year’s festival. All talks take place at ATU Galway City – Wellpark Road. Admission is free and booking is required.
Rachel Garfield discusses her practice as part of the TULCA 2026 Artist Talks Series. The talk accompanies Rachel Garfield’s presentation at Galway Arts Centre for Veruca Salt.
Rachel Garfield
Garfield is Professor of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art London. She is an award winning artist filmmaker who exhibits regularly at film festivals and galleries. Recently including The Whitechapel Art Gallery London, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, London Short Film Festival, ICA, London, Cal Arts, LA, USA, Ekso Space, Cyprus. She also publishes extensively on art, identity politics, feminism and film and is commissioning editor of peer review journal MIRAJ, (Moving Image Review and Art Journal). Her publications include Dwoskino: The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin, LUX, (2022) shortlisted for the Kraszna- Krausz award and Experimental Film making and Punk: Feminist Audio-Visual Culture of the 1970s and 1980s, Bloomsbury (2022) and has curated screenings in New York, Frankfurt, London, Bristol, Dublin, LA and Denver. She is co-editor (with Dr Jenny Chamarette) of the first anthology on Stephen Dwoskin, ‘Stephen Dwoskin Is….A Reappraisal’ (February 2027).
Artist Statement
My work is a personal cinema arising out of the traditions of experimental film, focusing on the lived relationships between people and structures. My experimental mode explores the form and visual textures of video (through different generations of the camera, from lo fi to high-end cameras). Adopting DIY approaches and disjunctive and collage-like aesthetics from punk and post-punk, I aim to transform the impoverished image into a rich, multi-layered enjoyment of the visual. Through the fractured rhythms of editing, juxtapositions of textures (hand-held, fixed shots, blurred and distinct images), and a plasticisation of the image through emphasis on colour and slowed-down film, my work combines found footage and montaging techniques with first person testimony. My use of these elements, my debt to twentieth century montage and the cut-up makes my work visually bold but not slick. I juxtapose this punk approach to production with a feminist-humanist documentary ethos: namely, to discreetly and sensitively bring the viewers’ attention to the difficulties, pressures, schisms and, ultimately, the potential for healing that comes out of negotiating different communities and identities. I am particularly interested in the relationships between insider and outsider perspectives, and how class, race and gender, as well as geography, politics and institutional memory shape and unshape personal identity. My work derives its authority from the chorus of voices it simultaneously assembles and disassembles. As such, my work is a felt archaeology of place and the body, which lays bare the natural awkwardnesses and contradictions of the marginalised, everyday voices of people that I invite to tell their stories with deadpan humour, irreverence and poignancy. In this, these suites of practice, evolving over lengthy time periods, affirm the right to self-inconsistency that is a constitutive part of our lived experience.
Garfield will also discuss her book, Experimental Filmmaking and Feminist Punk Audio Visual Culture in the 1970's and 1980's.
Free, advance booking required
ATU Galway City
Wellpark Road
Galway, H91 DY9Y
Access
Wheelchair access
Accessible toilet
Seating available
Accessible parking available
Event Time
10 November 2026
2–3.30pm
Getting There
Bus: Wellpark Road stop
Free parking
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Veruca Salt
Curated by Sinéad Keogh
6–22 November 2026
Galway, Ireland