Artist Talk: Vivienne Dick | 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.

Vivienne Dick discusses her practice as part of the TULCA 2026 Artist Talks Series. The talk accompanies Vivienne Dick’s presentation at TULCA Gallery for Veruca Salt.

Vivienne Dick
Vivienne Dick works with film, video and photography. Her films are concerned with gender politics, social issues, ecology and possible futures. She makes single and multiscreen work which combine elements of documentary, performance and fiction. Dick began making films in late seventies New York during a period referred to as ‘No Wave’. Later work was made in London, and in recent years, in Ireland. Her work has been shown widely with retrospectives in Queer Porto, Jeu de Paume, Paris, IMMA, Seville, Tate Modern, and Crawford Art Gallery. Recent group shows include Palais de Tokyo, Paris, RCC Letterkenny, Hawaii Contemporary, The Complex Arts Centre, Tate Britain, and IMMA, Dublin. Dick's films have been shown at festivals at the BFI, London, New York Film Festival, Cork, Dublin, FilmX, LA , Berlin, Edinburgh, Oberhausen, CPH:DOX, Copenhagen and others. New York Our Time, a Reel Art feature documentary, received the Dublin Film Critics Award at DIFF in 2020 and Best Documentary Award at Irish Film Festival, London. A member of Aosdána since 2000, her work is distributed by Lux UK and The Film Makers Coop NYC. Dick is grateful to An Chomhairle Ealaíon for its support.

Artist Statement
I make multi-layered, open-ended work framed from a female perspective and with an interest in gender politics, ecology, music, philosophy and possible futures. My early work is associated with the ‘No Wave’ music and film movement of late seventies New York. I work with film, video and sometimes photography. I make single and multiscreen work which combine elements of documentary, performance and fiction. Later work was made in London, and in recent years, in Ireland. My works shows in cinemas, museums, and galleries. I am a member of Aosdána. The film features punk playing pinball, Beate Nilsen, Ikue Mori, Lydia Lunch, Pat Place, Adele Bertei, and Anya Phillips. In Guérillère Talks the filmmaker’s presence is felt through the expressive camera movements which contribute an energy and intensity to this exploration into notions of identity, as performers perform themselves.

Free, advance booking required

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Veruca Salt
Curated by Sinéad Keogh
6–22 November 2026
Galway, Ireland

Curator's Talk: Sinéad Keogh and Aoife Natsumi Frehan

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.

The opening event features presentations by Sinéad Keogh and TULCA Education Coordinator Aoife Natsumi Frehan. Sinéad will introduce the curatorial framework and programme for Veruca Salt, followed by Aoife Natsumi, who will preview the 2026 Education Programme.

Marking fifty years since punk emerged as a disruptive cultural force, Veruca Salt considers what it means to know who you are and know what you want. The festival approaches punk not as a fixed historical style, but as a living method rooted in DIY culture, collective action and self-determination.

Women-led and countercultural perspectives connect an intergenerational programme of artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians and community organisations. Across five galleries and a wider series of events in Galway, Veruca Salt brings together exhibitions, film, performance, sound, writing, talks and workshops. The programme asks what punk’s insistence on agency, solidarity and reinvention can offer now, positioning art as a space for refusal, care and new forms of belonging.

Sinéad Keogh
Sinéad Keogh is a multimedia performance installation artist and curator with an MFA from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Keogh is the founder, director and curator of Soul Noir: Festival of the Dark Arts, a Dublin based festival for the Gothic and alternative arts (2017–2024).

Keogh’s curatorial practice aims to engage audiences with countercultural, underground and alternative voices that are often absent from the mainstream arts scene. Work with artists is approached in a direct and considered manner, alongside expanded programming and community engagement that seeks to broaden access and participation. A strong feminist position is present within this practice, alongside advocacy for artists and audiences who are blind or visually impaired.

Keogh has worked with artists ranging from emerging artists such as Bassam Al-Sabah and Shota Kotake to cult experimental film artist Vivienne Dick to other esteemed, established visual artists such as Alice Maher.

Aoife Natsumi Frehan
Aoife Natsumi Frehan is Education Coordinator at TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. Aoife Natsumi develops the festival’s education programme across primary, secondary and third-level education, community settings and the wider public. Aoife Natsumi will preview the 2026 Education Programme and introduce its emphasis on slow looking, critical engagement and conversation around contemporary art.

Free, advance booking required.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Veruca Salt
Curated by Sinéad Keogh
6–22 November 2026
Galway, Ireland

Thursday Lates: TULCA Education Tour: Dogs, Memory, and Myth

In this guided tour led by Aoife Natsumi Frehan, Education Coordinator for TULCA, we explore two works that each centre on human relationships with dogs, but in very different ways.

Artist Tom O'Dea’s Dog Liberation Organisation constructs a fictional radical archive questioning power, obedience, and control through the lens of human–animal relations. Meanwhile, Mourad Ben Amor’s film Bamssi weaves a tender portrait of displacement and longing, where dogs appear as quiet, loyal companions in a Tunisian domestic landscape.

This session is informal and discussion-led, a space to pause with moving image works, reflect together, and engage more deeply with the ideas they raise.

Free, no booking required.

Thursday Lates is funded by Galway City Council and the Department of Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sports as part of the Galway City Night-Time Economy Action Plan.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Image: Mourad Ben Amor, still from Bamssi, 2024, video, colour, 26 mins

Artist Talk: Jess Zamora-Turner

TULCA is pleased to present the Artist Talks Series as part of the 2025 programme, Strange lands still bear common ground, curated by Beulah Ezeugo. Continuing its ongoing partnership with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four talks throughout October and November 2025.

The series invites audiences to engage directly with artists and the curator, offering insights into their practices and the ideas shaping this year’s festival. All talks take place at ATU Wellpark Road, Galway. Admission is free and open to the public.

Jess Zamora-Turner is a British-Chilean visual artist and grower based in Berlin. Jess's practice can best be described as patchworking—making materials and histories belong together in ways they weren't meant to. Their emotional and spiritual remaking, unfolds slowly, either through her own hands or by allowing the elements—rain, mud, sunlight—to colour and shape the materials. As the textiles, threads, leaves, flowers and seeds come together to form her sculptures they form alternative sacred landscapes that challenge our political and environmental realities.

Jess frequently collaborates with poets, musicians, cooks, dancers, performers, and filmmakers to activate her works in collective rituals and events. Her practice expands on the tradition of Andean abstraction and experimental dyeing with plants that are foraged or specially grown. Jess is currently in her sixth year seasonally tending a garden on the Polish-German border, where she grows a diverse selection of heirloom plants as well as stewarding and saving at risk seed varieties.

Jess has exhibited at Shahin Zarinbal and Galerie Molitor in Berlin and at Hotel Warszawa Art Fair in Warsaw, Poland. Her collaboration with musicians and dancers, a public performance Zaplatanie was staged in Hasenheide Park in Berlin in 2022. She often leads workshops or communal events, such as herbal smudging workshops at Floating University in Berlin or Public Works Group in London.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Curator’s Gallery Tour: Beulah Ezeugo

Join Beulah Ezeugo for a walk around the TULCA Gallery in Hynes Building to hear about the development of the TULCA 2025 programme and explore the works on display by Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil, Seán O’Riordan, Jess Zamora-Turner, Mair Hughes, Emily Joy, Durre Shahwar, and Caoimhín Gaffney.

Beulah Ezeugo
Beulah Ezeugo is a curator and writer who works between Ireland and the UK. Her practice engages with postcolonial geographies and memory, and expands outward through critical writing, exhibition-making, and public programming. Beulah programmes the lecture series, Race, Rights, and Sovereignty at Glasgow School of Art, and is a cofounder (with Joselle Ntumba) of Éireann and I – a community archive and memory project. 

Recent residencies and projects include Platform Commissions, 41st EVA International (2025), SIRIUS Critic-in-Residence (2024), and 11:11 x Iniva Residency, Stuart Hall Library, London (2024). She was a Research Associate at CCA Derry~Londonderry (2022-24) and recipient of Glasgow International’s Black Curators Collective Bursary (2021). Her writing has appeared in The Irish Times, as well as in publications by Douglas Hyde Gallery, Durty Books, and Bloomers Magazine.

The talk is free and open to everyone, but advance booking is necessary.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Image: Curator’s Gallery Tour, TULCA Gallery, Hynes Building, TULCA 2025. Photo: Mary McGraw

Thursday Lates: TULCA Curator’s Tour and Archive Engagement

Join us for a special evening at Galway Arts Centre as part of TULCA’s Thursday Lates series. Curator Beulah Ezeugo will lead a public tour of the full exhibition, sharing insights into works by Tom O'Dea, Saoirse Amira Anis, Peter Tresnan, Mourad Ben Amor, Abel Shah, and the Shared Migrants (Archive) project.

Throughout the evening, the TULCA Education team will also be on hand to support informal engagement with the Shared Migrants (Archive), a participatory installation by Bojana Jankovic and Nessa Finnegan. This is a chance to experience the archive in an open, drop-in format and contribute to a growing body of reflections and stories.

Free, no booking required.

Thursday Lates is funded by Galway City Council and the Department of Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sports as part of the Galway City Night-Time Economy Action Plan.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Image: Bojana Janković and Nessa Finnegan, An entry from the Shared Migrants (Archive). Photo: Nessa Finnegan

Artist Talk: Tom O'Dea

TULCA is pleased to present the Artist Talks Series as part of the 2025 programme, Strange lands still bear common ground, curated by Beulah Ezeugo. Continuing its ongoing partnership with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four talks throughout October and November 2025.

The series invites audiences to engage directly with artists and the curator, offering insights into their practices and the ideas shaping this year’s festival. All talks take place at ATU Wellpark Road, Galway. Admission is free and open to the public.

Artist Tom O’Dea will present a performance lecture combining readings, moving image, and reflection on his work developed for TULCA 2025. This hybrid talk expands on his interest in human relations with animals and artificial intelligence, and the role of power in these relationships.

Tom O’Dea
Tom O’Dea is an artist who works with sculpture, media and social practice to explore how different forms of knowledge impact upon our ways of acting and being the world. His work interrogates the political implications of knowledge production, practices of computation and organisation in contemporary society. His work explores “computation” beyond that which occurs on electronic machines to a series of knowledge practices that are connected to intertwining histories of scientific legitimation, bureaucracy and colonial expansion.

Tom is a studio lecturer in Sculpture and Expanded Practices in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. He is member of the Orthogonal Methods Group (OMG), an art-research group, one of the organisers of Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA) and an member of Dublin Digital Radio.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Curator’s Gallery Tour: Beulah Ezeugo

Join Beulah Ezeugo for a walk around the TULCA Gallery in Hynes Building to hear about the development of the TULCA 2025 programme and explore the works on display by Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil, Seán O’Riordan, Jess Zamora-Turner, Mair Hughes, Emily Joy, Durre Shahwar, and Caoimhín Gaffney.

Beulah Ezeugo
Beulah Ezeugo is a curator and writer who works between Ireland and the UK. Her practice engages with postcolonial geographies and memory, and expands outward through critical writing, exhibition-making, and public programming. Beulah programmes the lecture series, Race, Rights, and Sovereignty at Glasgow School of Art, and is a cofounder (with Joselle Ntumba) of Éireann and I – a community archive and memory project. 

Recent residencies and projects include Platform Commissions, 41st EVA International (2025), SIRIUS Critic-in-Residence (2024), and 11:11 x Iniva Residency, Stuart Hall Library, London (2024). She was a Research Associate at CCA Derry~Londonderry (2022-24) and recipient of Glasgow International’s Black Curators Collective Bursary (2021). Her writing has appeared in The Irish Times, as well as in publications by Douglas Hyde Gallery, Durty Books, and Bloomers Magazine.

The talk is free and open to everyone, but advance booking is necessary.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Image: Curator’s Gallery Tour, TULCA Gallery, Hynes Building, TULCA 2025. Photo: Mary McGraw

Artist Insights: Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil | TULCA 2025

Artist Insights is an ongoing interview featuring artists participating in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. Through short filmed conversations, the series offers insight into artistic processes, thematic concerns, and the ideas shaping each edition of the festival.

Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil

Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil is an Irish artist, writer and filmmaker working between Dublin, London and the less explored regions of cosmic experience. They previously worked under the name Loitering Theatre. Mac Cathmhaoil’s practice is esoteric in nature, where video, text, artificial intellect, viral interference and future archaeologies of time are alchemically melded together to disrupt the technologies and belief systems of consensus reality.

In the two-channel video installation, Mirror States, two disparate islands with intertwined histories are put in mirrored reflection. In the late early twentieth century, Cuba was described in Irish and American revolutionary and political circles as ‘The Ireland of the West’. Cuba, as it was then, was proposed as the model state from which a new Ireland could be imagined. The two islands also shared an exchange of revolutionary leaders: Ireland gave Cuba its charismatic grandson, Che Guevara Lynch. In return, Cuba gave Ireland the unusually sombre and austere Eamon De Valera.

Cuba largely fulfilled the socialist dream of its uprising, with large plazas celebrating the country’s heroes. Dublin, in contrast, never developed a similar visual language of commemoration of its revolutionary triumph. The heroes of Ireland’s rising are hidden in small statues down exhaust-fumed back streets, hardly noticed, their dreams forgotten. Both islands seem to have forgotten their once common ground of political potential and comparison. Both islands now also share a strange secret United States military base in the west: Shannon Airport and Guantanamo Bay. The film, composed of footage shot between Havana and Dublin from 2022 to 2025 and interwoven with found material and online archives, asks what might be rediscovered when two histories, sometimes parallel, sometimes divergent, are brought into dialogue once more.

Video documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Peter Tresnan | TULCA 2025

Artist Insights is an ongoing interview featuring artists participating in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. Through short filmed conversations, the series offers insight into artistic processes, thematic concerns, and the ideas shaping each edition of the festival.

Peter Tresnan

Peter Tresnan’s work concerns the internal worlds of queer people. In his process, he explores how time and space in these internal worlds are bent around notions of history, nature, and decolonization. His work begins with the thesis that queerness is a wilderness that is as much a part of nature as people are. From this departure, he is able to explore how memory, power, history, and affect inform the landscape; his work as the artist is to negotiate the relationship between figure and landscape. The images he creates bear witness to giants in jarring landscapes, atmospheres of smoke and memory, and figures emerging from or falling into abstraction. Making the work is a process of discovery, and its creation connects him to the worlds he is invoking. In this making, he seeks to understand the multidimensional spaces that queer people create and inhabit, visualising moments and time that are fleeting, guarded, and sacred.

The Longest Shadow Ever Cast is a diptych presenting a singular figure emerging from the ocean. Their gaze is a puddle of emotions set against a vibrant sky and dark clouds, while their body moves purposefully toward the viewer. The vertically arranged diptych is divided horizontally: the upper half rendered in oil on linen, and the lower half an abstracted figurative drawing combining charcoal, acrylics, and spray paint on tulle. Across these media, the figure remains whole, uniting the two canvases. The paintings sit along an axis oriented 254° west-southwest, facing toward New York City. Their doubles are currently in New York, displayed at 334 Broome Gallery, facing Galway at 106° east-northeast. Together, the two diptychs form the poles of a transatlantic cross-section, enclosing a nearly 5,000-kilometre void between the two sites. Opposite the diptych, a single-channel video explores decolonial action and queer joy through the fluidity of bodies in movement, gesture, aggression, and sexuality.

Video documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Caoimhín Gaffney | TULCA 2025

Artist Insights is an ongoing interview featuring artists participating in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. Through short filmed conversations, the series offers insight into artistic processes, thematic concerns, and the ideas shaping each edition of the festival.

Caoimhín Gaffney

Caoimhín Gaffney is an artist working with film, photography and writing, whose work has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally. Gaffney graduated from the Royal College of Art (MA Photography and Moving Image) in 2011 and received their PhD from Ulster University’s School of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences in 2022. Solo exhibitions include the Crawford Art Gallery, Block 336 in London, Contemporary Art Institute (CAI02) in Sapporo, and a national touring exhibition of new work from the Butler Gallery to the Highlanes and Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre.

The works on view are drawn from All at Once Collapsing Together, a series of medium-format photographs that act as mirrors to the healing that the natural environment can offer. Text fragments, infused with climate anxiety, interrupt and reframe these scenes as fleeting and fragile. The series poses questions from an unnamed protagonist who considers the potential of the natural world as a site for recovery from trauma. Strands of queer thought are threaded through the series, unsettling conventions of nature writing and intertwining with fantasies of destruction and transformation. Together, these elements invite reflection on the traces we leave on the earth, and on the porous boundaries between body, environment, and disintegration.

Video documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Mair Hughes | TULCA 2025

Artist Insights is an ongoing interview featuring artists participating in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. Through short filmed conversations, the series offers insight into artistic processes, thematic concerns, and the ideas shaping each edition of the festival.

Mair Hughes

Hughes creates sculptural installations that centre material practices and ecological narratives, employing a wide variety of media from site-specific work to ceramics, textiles, drawing and photography. Her work makes adventurous, playful connections between obscured histories and the contemporary world, connecting with activities of forage, reuse and improvisation. Hughes’ current work explores landscape, archaeology and simple acts of dwelling, taking a long perspective on belonging and place.

The Borderlands/Y Gororau is a project led by Mair Hughes. The project explores the potency, plurality and value of Welsh borderland landscapes, and personal experiences of dual identity and Welshness. Emily Joy, Mair Hughes, and Durre Shahwar create work which reflects on sites across the Welsh borderlands, bringing together collaborative research and individual responses through their practice in writing, photography, sculpture and site-specific exploration.

A Field Guide to the Offa’s Dyke delves into the artist’s experience of growing up in the Welsh borders with dual Welsh-English identity. The installation explores the psychogeography of the dyke in the present time, alongside speculative reimaginings of the borderlands and dual identities as a space of creative potential as well as ambiguity. The installation draws on the form of Offa’s dyke, an ancient border earthwork which marks a distinct physical line across the Welsh borderland landscape. The Dyke was constructed in an uneven shape, with the bank much higher on the Welsh side, to allow long views into the landscape. The wool textile piece reimagines a slogan painted on a farmhouse inhabited by members of the artist’s family. The new version, in Welsh, reads ‘Nid ni oddi wrth frenhinoedd, na brenhinoedd oddi wrthym ni’, which means ‘Not We From Kings, Nor From Us Kings’.

The audio reflects on visits to sites on the dyke, combined with reflections on family and the borderlands.

Video documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Talk: Seán O’Riordan

TULCA is pleased to present the Artist Talks Series as part of the 2025 programme, Strange lands still bear common ground, curated by Beulah Ezeugo. Continuing its ongoing partnership with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four talks throughout October and November 2025.

The series invites audiences to engage directly with artists and the curator, offering insights into their practices and the ideas shaping this year’s festival. All talks take place at ATU Wellpark Road, Galway. Admission is free and open to the public.

Artist Seán O’Riordan will discuss their recent work presented in Strange lands still bear common ground, reflecting on their process, research, and the ideas underpinning their installation for TULCA 2025.

Seán O’Riordan
Seán O’Riordan (b. Galway) works across ceramics, woodwork, textiles, writing, and digital processes to explore the politics of desire, value, and the iconographic histories of consumption. Combining architectural and industrial techniques with found materials and ceramic works, O’Riordan encodes perceptions of value through sexuality and non-dominant language, examining how linguistic, material, and affective economies shape our sense of worth, place, and identity.

Through the subversion of cultural codes, O’Riordan treats sculpture as a tool for semi-fictional worldbuilding. The works interrogate dominant frameworks through large-scale installations and detailed objects that often spill outward as rebellious, sometimes playful, built environments.

Seán is a graduate of NCAD, Dublin (BA Fine Art, 2016), and the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam (MFA, 2023). Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at VISUAL Carlow, Engage Art Studios (Galway), W139 (Amsterdam), and Western Carolina University (US).

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Curator's Talk: Beulah Ezeugo

TULCA is pleased to present the Artist Talks Series as part of the 2025 programme, Strange lands still bear common ground, curated by Beulah Ezeugo. Continuing its ongoing partnership with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four talks throughout October and November 2025.

The series invites audiences to engage directly with artists and the curator, offering insights into their practices and the ideas shaping this year’s festival. All talks take place at ATU Wellpark Road, Galway. Admission is free and open to the public.

The opening talk of the series features Beulah Ezeugo, curator of Strange lands still bear common ground. Beulah will discuss the curatorial framework behind this year’s exhibition, exploring how the selected artists respond to questions of belonging, shared histories, and the role of collective imagination in fractured times.

Beulah Ezeugo
Beulah Ezeugo is a curator and writer who works between Ireland and the UK. Her practice engages with postcolonial geographies and memory, and expands outward through critical writing, exhibition-making, and public programming. Beulah programmes the lecture series, Race, Rights, and Sovereignty at Glasgow School of Art, and is a cofounder (with Joselle Ntumba) of Éireann and I – a community archive and memory project. 

Recent residencies and awards include Platform Commissions, 41st EVA International (2025), SIRIUS Critic-in-Residence (2024), and 11:11 x Iniva Residency, Stuart Hall Library, London (2024). She was a Research Associate at CCA Derry~Londonderry (2022-24) and recipient of Glasgow International’s Black Curators Collective Bursary (2021). Her writing has appeared in The Irish Times, as well as in publications by Douglas Hyde Gallery, Durty Books, and Bloomers Magazine.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland

Artist Talk: Sean Lynch

TULCA is pleased to announce the return of its Artist Talks Series as part of the 2024 programme, The Salvage Agency, curated by Michele Horrigan. Building on its longstanding collaboration with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four artist talks throughout November 2024. The series will be held at ATU Wellpark Road and the Galway City Museum.

Sean Lynch
Sean Lynch lives and works in Askeaton, County Limerick. He represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Prominent solo exhibitions include City Hall, Melbourne (2023), Edinburgh Art Festival (2021); Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2019); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2017); Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver (2016); Rose Art Museum, Boston (2016), Modern Art Oxford (2014) and Hugh Lane Gallery (2013). He has held fellowships and been a visiting professor at universities and colleges in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada, and is a graduate of the Stadelschule, Frankfurt. In Dublin, he regularly exhibits at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery and in early 2024 presented a two-person collaborative exhibition at The Complex with Laura Ní Fhlaibhín. Alongside Michele Horrigan, he works at Askeaton Contemporary Arts, an artist-led residency, commissioning and publication initiative situated in the west of Ireland and nomadically since 2006.

Editing: Jonathan Sammon

Join Michele Horrigan for a walk around the Printworks Gallery to hear about the development of the TULCA 2024 programme.

Michele Horrigan is an artist and independent curator. Since 2006 she is founder and curator of Askeaton Contemporary Arts, facilitating artist experimentation and residencies, exhibitions and publication production in rural County Limerick. Over one hundred projects have been realised with a particular interest in contemporary art engaged in site-specific, ecological and social practice. Many artworks made in this context have subsequently been presented throughout the world in exhibitions, art biennials and film festivals.

Since 2014, she is editor and publisher of A.C.A. PUBLIC, a publication venture with over twenty titles exploring the many meanings and relationships between art and the public realm. Michele has curated exhibitions and public programmes at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow; EVA International - Ireland’s Biennale of Contemporary Art, Limerick; Kunstvlaai Biennial for Experimental Art, Amsterdam; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; Lismore Castle Arts; Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin and The National Women’s Council of Ireland, amongst others. Exhibitions of her artwork have been presented at Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Frankfurter Kunstverein and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin. In addition, her writing, essays and articles have been commissioned for, among others, Mousse Publishing, Winter Papers, Paper Visual Art Journal, Dundee Contemporary Arts and Bomb Magazine.

Michele studied art at the University of Ulster, Belfast and the Städelschule, Frankfurt. She is a member of IKT, the international association of curators of contemporary art, and an active collaborator with New York’s Independent Curators International. In 2022 she was presented a Civic Award by Limerick City & County Council in recognition of her ongoing curatorial work in Askeaton. In 2024 she will present the activities of Askeaton Contemporary Arts at the Curatorial Forum held at EXPO CHICAGO on the theme of Curating and the Commons. She continues to develop artistic and curatorial projects for PUBLICS, Helsinki, Flat Time House in London, Schloss Britz in Berlin, and The Model, Sligo.

The talks are free and open to everyone, but advance booking is necessary.

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photographic documentation: Ros Kavanagh

Gallery Talk: Peter Fend in conversation with Sean Lynch

Peter Fend and Ocean Earth have over five decades of proposed speculative and visionary ecological projects that rethink the relationships between art, power and the planet. A global figure in contemporary art, Fend sees its potential for radical change with the use of biomass, seaweed, wind and wave power, and his ideas have often led him into friction with the representatives of government agencies, Big Oil and energy suppression. In conversation with artist Sean Lynch, he outlines what role Ireland has to play in these dialogues.

The talks are free and open to everyone, but advance booking is necessary.

Tour guide Brendan Hynes presents a walking tour of Galway’s industrial heritage, with a focus on its canals and maritime history. Join us for a walking tour exploring Galway's Industrial Heritage. The tour begins at the Galway Tourist Information Centre within the Galway City Museum and winds through the city's streets and canals.

The tour is free and open to everyone, but advance booking is necessary.

Artist Talk: Michael Holly

TULCA is pleased to announce the return of its Artist Talks Series as part of the 2024 programme, The Salvage Agency, curated by Michele Horrigan. Building on its longstanding collaboration with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four artist talks throughout November 2024. The series will be held at ATU Wellpark Road and the Galway City Museum.

Michael Holly
Bridging the divide between documentary film and the artworld, Michael Holly’s moving image productions appear regularly on Only in Askeaton, an online platform initially developed by Askeaton Contemporary Arts during COVID-19 lockdowns. Exploratory in nature and intensively curious about how art is discussed, made and disseminated in Irish society, his subjects and topics have ranged from curator Lucy Lippard’s 1985 exhibition of Irish art, ‘Divisions, Crossroads, Turns of Mind’, to a profile of writer and artist Adrian Duncan’s decade-long investigation of Bungalow Bliss – a collection of affordable house designs that resulted in thousands of new dwellings appearing in Irish towns and countryside since the 1970s.

Holly’s presence at TULCA weaves in and out of fellow artists in the exhibition, offering insights into their creative paths and intrinsic relationships to landscape and nature. Holly follows Seanie Barron collecting timber in the Limerick countryside, to be transformed into walking sticks. In one scene, Barron turns to the camera with a piece of knotted wood and proclaims its likeliness to a faraway galaxy. Lily of the Valley, realised in collaboration with Mieke Vanmechelen, digs deep into the memories, documents and artworks that today remain of Lily Van Oost’s legacy, including the archival unearthing of her Brian Boru’s Coat, a gift she made to the National Museum of Ireland after receiving Irish citizenship in 1986.

Editing: Jonathan Sammon

TULCA Assembly brings together critical voices from Ireland, Europe and the United States, sharing artistic research and asking crucial questions about the role of artmaking, activism and environmental discourse today. Scheduled on Saturday afternoon, 9th November at Market Street’s PorterShed, TULCA Assembly is part of a wider public programme presented as part of TULCA 2024: The Salvage Agency.

At TULCA Assembly, Risteard Ó Domhnaill, one of Ireland’s most renowned documentary filmmakers, speaks about his current research and long term approach to communities and places in conflict with governmental and corporate policies. Irish curator, artist, writer and educator Paul O’Neill is a global voice on the possibilities and energies that exhibition-making and contemporary art practice can achieve - he shares his recent findings. Kate O’Shea’s activist work and publishing activities have constantly found new perspectives for an egalitarian Ireland. Becky Nahom, in her role as Director of Exhibitions at New York’s Independent Curators International, has developed numerous experimental exhibitions that challenge art historical narratives across the globe. Stephanie Smith’s curatorial work in Chicago and elsewhere is acknowledged for commitments to groundbreaking ecological thinking through art. Artist JD Whitman’s involvement in digital preservation of Ireland’s nineteenth century Blaschka glass models of marine invertebrates has a special resonance, considering the important collection on exhibit at the University of Galway’s Zoology and Marine Biology Museum. Micol Curatolo highlights her work around borders, cultural work, belonging and identity in Finland, and launches her new edited publication Here, Not. Dialogues on art and the making of here.

TULCA Assembly was produced in association with Askeaton Contemporary Arts. Supported by the Arts Council, Galway City Council and Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

Kate O’Shea

Micol Curatolo

Becky Nahom

Stephanie Smith

Risteard O’Domhnaill

JD Whitman

Paul O’Neill

TULCA Assembly Schedule

12.00 - Welcome teas and coffees
12.30 - Introduction by Michele Horrigan to TULCA Assembly
12.40 - Kate O’Shea
13.00 - Micol Curatolo
13.20 - Becky Nahom
13.40 - 30 min lunch break
14.20 - Stephanie Smith
14.40 - Risteard O’Domhnall
15.00 - Coffee break
15.10 - J.D. Whitman
15.30 - Paul O’Neill
15:50 - Closing remarks and panel discussion with time for Q+A
16:30 - Wrap up and Post-Assembly informal/casual conversations

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon

Join us for a tour of the Hall of the Red Earl with local historian William Henry. William Henry is a storyteller, historian, and writer with over 25 books to his name. He brings a wealth of knowledge about the history and archaeology of Galway city.

The Hall of the Red Earl is a captivating medieval archaeological site located in the heart of Galway. Managed by Dúchas na Gaillimhe - Galway Civic Trust, this site dates back to the 13th century and is tied to the founding of Galway by the Anglo-Norman De Burgo family. It served as the city’s first municipal building, functioning as a tax office, courthouse, and banquet hall all in one. The hall is named after Richard de Burgo, the Earl of Ulster, who was the grandson of the town's founder.

In the late 15th century, the influential ‘Tribe’ families took control from the De Burgos, leading to the hall’s abandonment and subsequent decline. Over the centuries, it was covered and built over until its remains were rediscovered by Office of Public Works (OPW) archaeologists in 1997 during plans for an office extension next door. The site was recognizable from a renowned c. 1651 Pictorial Map of Galway.

A significant excavation revealed over 11,000 artefacts. The discovery of the Red Earl’s Hall prompted a redesign of the proposed extension to preserve the archaeological site. Today, the hall is enclosed in glass panelling, featuring a viewing gangway with flood-lighting. Interpretive panels explain the site’s significance, and replicas of the artefacts are prominently displayed for visitors.

Galway Civic Trust is a not-for-profit charity. Please consider making a donation here

Artist Talk: Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty

TULCA is pleased to announce the return of its Artist Talks Series as part of the 2024 programme, The Salvage Agency, curated by Michele Horrigan. Building on its longstanding collaboration with the ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host four artist talks throughout November 2024. The series will be held at ATU Wellpark Road and the Galway City Museum.

Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty
Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty are collaborative artists living and working in the North-West of Ireland. They use performance, video, sound installation and storytelling, along with a detailed research process, to convey visions of transience and resistance. Their recent work tests the possibility of creating a new narrative identity for Ireland that will acknowledge our struggles, admit our complicities and build our capacity for solidarity.

A Collection of Disarticulated Bones is a new body of video work, photographs and objects made and combined for TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, curated by Michele Horrigan. This long-term project traverses centres of knowledge in the US, UK and Europe in order to unpick different foundation myths of the Global North: institutional, pop cultural and embodied. A Collection of Disarticulated Bones examines how decisions relating to preservation and presentation of histories can shape national and individual identities, in the context of imperialism, late capitalism, rising ethnonationalism and polarised public debate on both sides of the Atlantic.

This research is supported by Askeaton Contemporary Arts, the Centre for Creative Technologies at University of Galway, Galway Culture Company, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Creative Heartlands, Galway City Museum and the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2024, A Collection of Disarticulated Bones toured to Solas Nua, Washington D.C. and The New Music + Technology Festival at the Moss Arts Centre (Virginia Technical University).

Editing: Jonathan Sammon

Gallery Talk: Seanie Barron

Join us for an informal talk in the Printworks Gallery with exhibiting artist Seanie Barron and TULCA 2024 curator Michele Horrigan.

For decades, Seanie Barron has carved and shaped wood in a workshop at the rear of his house on Plunkett Road in Askeaton town. His creations, made with simple hand tools and an intuitive approach, are borne out of his understanding of nature and often-humorous interpretations of the environment around him. He roams around Askeaton, looking for the right branch in a field or underneath a bush to then shape into a walking stick. These often take on surreal forms referencing seahorses, weasels, dancers, extraterrestrials, dolphins, foxes or swimmers. Many double as whistles, or incorporate found objects such as coins, bullets or animal bones. Driftwood often found by the Shannon Estuary morphs into film characters, shipwrecks or talismanic sculptures that accompany him inside his studio.

Barron’s art has had a private trajectory, fermenting secretly for many years before being revealed in a flourish. After featuring in his first exhibition a decade ago in the tourist office in Askeaton, his work has been seen in galleries and museums in London, Dublin and Helsinki. Irish daytime radio has proclaimed his art as ‘the next big thing for Irish hipsters once they finish growing their beards.’ Fashion photographers today arrive on his doorstep, making portfolios of images, printed far away in Paris and Barcelona. He often tours around Ireland, enthralling audiences with stories related to his art and life. At a packed village hall on Inishbofin island, he once explained his philosophy on keeping active, claiming that ‘there are two things that can kill you in this life: the electric chair and the armchair!’ Famously, his An Poc Ar Buile performances in annual harvest parades and Saint Patrick’s Day events in the 1970s and 1980s are still remembered, featured here in a press image from the time.

Barron literally takes it all in his stride, choosing a new walking stick from his collection each day to go on his evening walk. He shares his vast knowledge of the west Limerick terrain with visiting artists, acquired after a lifetime of roaming around Askeaton, into and through hedges and bushes. Half close your eyes, take a journey with him, walk through arboreal countryside, feel the grain of the timber in your hand, and hold the handle of the stick to the ground that reconnects it back again to its earthiness... it’s the spark that created the universe!

Join Michele Horrigan for a walk around the Printworks Gallery to hear about the development of the TULCA 2024 programme.

Michele Horrigan is an artist and independent curator. Since 2006 she is founder and curator of Askeaton Contemporary Arts, facilitating artist experimentation and residencies, exhibitions and publication production in rural County Limerick. Over one hundred projects have been realised with a particular interest in contemporary art engaged in site-specific, ecological and social practice. Many artworks made in this context have subsequently been presented throughout the world in exhibitions, art biennials and film festivals.

Since 2014, she is editor and publisher of A.C.A. PUBLIC, a publication venture with over twenty titles exploring the many meanings and relationships between art and the public realm. Michele has curated exhibitions and public programmes at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow; EVA International - Ireland’s Biennale of Contemporary Art, Limerick; Kunstvlaai Biennial for Experimental Art, Amsterdam; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; Lismore Castle Arts; Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin and The National Women’s Council of Ireland, amongst others. Exhibitions of her artwork have been presented at Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Frankfurter Kunstverein and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin. In addition, her writing, essays and articles have been commissioned for, among others, Mousse Publishing, Winter Papers, Paper Visual Art Journal, Dundee Contemporary Arts and Bomb Magazine.

Michele studied art at the University of Ulster, Belfast and the Städelschule, Frankfurt. She is a member of IKT, the international association of curators of contemporary art, and an active collaborator with New York’s Independent Curators International. In 2022 she was presented a Civic Award by Limerick City & County Council in recognition of her ongoing curatorial work in Askeaton. In 2024 she will present the activities of Askeaton Contemporary Arts at the Curatorial Forum held at EXPO CHICAGO on the theme of Curating and the Commons. She continues to develop artistic and curatorial projects for PUBLICS, Helsinki, Flat Time House in London, Schloss Britz in Berlin, and The Model, Sligo.

The talks are free and open to everyone, but advance booking is necessary.

Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photographic documentation: Ros Kavanagh

Artist Insights: Stuart Whipps | TULCA 2024

Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.

Stuart Whipps
Birmingham-based artist Stuart Whipps’ new performance and installation, The Leviathan of Parsonstown, shares its title with the name given to the historic telescope that sits in the ornate grounds of Birr Castle in Offaly. Built in 1845, it remained the largest telescope in the world for seventy-two years, drawing visitors to see the previously unknown spirals of faraway galaxies. Its creation was driven by intense curiosity and the tremendous personal wealth of the wife of its patron, William Parsons. Whipps points out the materials that made one of Ireland’s greatest scientific wonders possible: ‘Parsons saw the potential in using speculum metal, an alloy made from copper and tin, as the material for the reflective mirror – in order to learn about the stars above our heads, we must first extract metals from the rocks and mud that sit beneath our feet.’

Continued research for Whipps has led to the James Mitchell Geology Museum, founded in 1852 at the University of Galway with thousands of rock, mineral, and fossil specimens, along with the remains of a larger natural history museum once on campus. Still appearing as a nineteenth- century room with few modern updates, it is referred to by many as a ‘museum of a museum’. Given full access to the collection throughout 2024, Whipps has worked closely with the site, artefacts and the generosity, endless knowledge and enthusiasm of curator John Murray, teasing out a new performance artwork and a subtle rearrangement of objects and labelling in the museum.

Video documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Aine Phillips | TULCA 2024

Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.

Aine Phillips
Internationally known for four decades of performance and video artwork that constantly challenge the patriarchal structures of society, Áine Phillips’ video and sculpture installation The Secret is modest in its appearance; on a gallery floor, a small monitor is found lying on its back inside a cardboard box, with packaging placed in its vicinity.

Inside, a short silent video records a secluded road behind Dublin’s giant IKEA superstore, where discarded furniture and junk are seen in the shadow of the retail giant. Phillips notes of the scene, ‘This is the concealed and hidden secret of the consumers promise: the brief life span of our material lives. Our dreams turn to dust. Everything returns to the earth.’

Video documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Niamh Moriarty | TULCA 2024

Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.

Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty
Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty are collaborative artists living and working in the North-West of Ireland. They use performance, video, sound installation and storytelling, along with a detailed research process, to convey visions of transience and resistance. Their recent work tests the possibility of creating a new narrative identity for Ireland that will acknowledge our struggles, admit our complicities and build our capacity for solidarity.

A Collection of Disarticulated Bones is a new body of video work, photographs and objects made and combined for TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, curated by Michele Horrigan. This long-term project traverses centres of knowledge in the US, UK and Europe in order to unpick different foundation myths of the Global North: institutional, pop cultural and embodied. A Collection of Disarticulated Bones examines how decisions relating to preservation and presentation of histories can shape national and individual identities, in the context of imperialism, late capitalism, rising ethnonationalism and polarised public debate on both sides of the Atlantic.

This research is supported by Askeaton Contemporary Arts, the Centre for Creative Technologies at University of Galway, Galway Culture Company, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Creative Heartlands, Galway City Museum and the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2024, A Collection of Disarticulated Bones toured to Solas Nua, Washington D.C. and The New Music + Technology Festival at the Moss Arts Centre (Virginia Technical University).

Video documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Julie Morrissy | TULCA 2024

Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.

Julie Morrissy
Julie Morrissy is an Irish poet, academic, critic, and activist. Morrissy’s poetry-artworks have been exhibited at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, the Museum of Literature Ireland, and acquired for the Ireland State Art Collection. Her first collection Where, the Mile End (2019) is published by Book*hug (Canada) and tall-lighthouse (UK). Her awards include the Holy Show Absolutely Anywhere Residency, MAKE Theatre Residency Award, the ‘Next Generation’ Artist Award and Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland. She was a contributing participant in playwriting at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference 2022. She hosts a sporadic reading series in her home called Pizza Poetry Pub, which has featured international and local writers Dionne Irving, sam sax, Erin Robinsong, Ronan Kelly, and Eamon McGuinness. She is a regular a critic for Poetry Ireland Review and Books Ireland Magazine.

Disappearing Acts is a story-telling circle led by poet Julie Morrissy, drawing on collective cultures of myth, storytelling, and faith healing in Ireland. Participants will be invited to share their own stories and experiences and/or intergenerational stories passed down to them. Following from the engagement with law in her practice, Morrissy will link these ideas to Article 45 of Bunreacht na hÉireann/The Irish Constitution, the only article that is non-enforceable and therefore has no legal teeth. Article 45 sets out the principles of social policy, carrying remnants of pre-independence values around care, agency, collective responsibility and protection, which perhaps vanished into the legal frameworks of the Irish State. Morrissy will lead the circle, bringing together participants’ stories and inputs to explore how the legal text of Article 45 engages with the legacies of myth and healing, while considering how those ideas manifest (or not) in Ireland’s contemporary laws and culture.

Video documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Bryony Dunne | TULCA 2024

Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.

Bryony Dunne
Bryony Dunne’s recent films and sculptures act as complex mediations on man’s conquest of nature and desire for domination and superiority. Her 2022 feature film, Surrender Your Horns, considers the true story of the smuggling of rhino horns, stolen from Irish and British museums, to be ground down for traditional Eastern medicine and consumed to supposedly enhance masculine virility. In Dunne’s hands, a man undergoes a Kafkaesque metamorphosis into a rhino- headed man, and documentary footage merges with Theatre of the Absurd-style performance.

Her new sculptures, collectively entitled Drifting, were realised during a residency at the European Ceramic Workcentre (EKWC) in The Netherlands in late 2023. Emerging from Topographia Hibernica – an account of the plentiful flora, fauna and barbaric people of Ireland, produced in the year 1188, soon after the Anglo-Norman invasion – a narrative begins to unravel. With the medieval desire to explain everything as a unified system, descriptions in the book believed that the barnacle goose, a bird, was born from the goose barnacle, a crustacean. Both species have visual similarities: the mouth of the crustacean opening and closing could be imagined as a bird’s beak looking for food. Dunne’s sculptures reimagine this correlation, while also transposing this story into a further appearance of goose barnacles. In 2015, thousands of these crustaceans attached themselves onto Elon Musk’s failed SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, as seen when it was recovered from the sea off Cornwall.

Video documentation: Laura Griffin

Artist Insights: Catriona Leahy | TULCA 2024

Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.

Catriona Leahy
Catriona Leahy’s digital animation and photographic lightbox series continues her ongoing investigations into the degradation of bogs of the Irish Midlands. State-sponsored strip mining, or ‘peat harvesting’ as it was commonly known in Ireland until the recent cessation of decades of operation, has left behind a post-industrial landscape, and Leahy is one of many contemporary artists in Ireland drawn to its complexities and potential for regenerative thought. Reflecting in a recent interview with Marc O’Sullivan in The Irish Examiner, she writes that she has come to think of the bog as ‘a huge archive, a repository of memory. It harbours a lot of mythologies and histories and traumas, of our own colonial past, and the tensions that arise out of that.’

Bog Thing*: Assembly* for the Symbiocene is a 3D-animated scan of surface area of bog from which peat has been mechanically extracted. The resulting image reveals a form that bears uncanny resemblance to an amphitheatre, albeit a broken, fragmented, one. Leahy’s writings correlate these similarities into speculative understanding:

“As an ancient civic space, the amphitheatre was a place of assembly. However, long before the manmade construction of these historic monumental stone formations, these sites for public assembly (or Things as they were known in the early Germanic Period) were landscape-based forums where important community matters were discussed. Over time, Things moved indoors, became more centralised; land surveying and subsequent land-enclosure slowly did away with the commons, which was a central prerequisite for Thing assemblies/Thing parliaments for discussing things-that-matter.

Here, my Bog Thing aims to reimagine our contemporary political forums where policy is proposed, discussed and ratified, as a kind of landscape parliament – one that represents and brings into the fold the other-than-human entities that we share our planet with. Rather than the bog as Terra Nullius – a nobody’s land – can we reimagine the bog as a space for all species, including human – a dynamic great ecology over which no single group or species holds jurisdiction?”

Video documentation: Laura Griffin