REVIEW: Catherine Harty | Circa Art Magazine

The syntonic state of TULCA is dispersed over seven venues, drifting through Galway City, from the Columban Hall to a 70’s bungalow (the location of the 126 Gallery). The technology of the contemporary art exhibition frames this meander through the elements lashed Atlantic coastal city. This local context is the ground on which the various manifestations of the show appear. We attempt to read these materialisations in relation to each other – what is the story that can be read in our journey, part flâneur, and part down-at-heel detective?

Filmed documentation of the opening event of TULCA, Aoibheann Greenan’s The Life of Riley, a commissioned procession through the streets of Galway, is shown at the Fishery Watchtower. John Riley was an Irish emigrant who changed sides in the 1847 American War of Intervention. He became part of the San Patricios, a battalion of Irish and Polish soldiers who fought for Mexico. I was momentarily excited by this turncoat until I discovered it was his Catholic religion, as opposed to his anti-imperialist sentiments, which prompted him to change sides. There is also a pamphlet available with the lyrics to the song composed for the event. The story is the important aspect of this work, bringing out a little known incident of history with a local aspect (Riley being from Clifden) which has a resonance with the present moment and the continued tensions around the relations between the US and Mexico. The format of the street procession is a way to involve people who might not visit a gallery, it also echoes other marches and street protests, a form where ‘the people’ can make their voices heard, a possession of public space as a means of demanding attention. Costumes and props from this event are displayed at the main Festival Gallery, positioned to be seen from the street, through glass.

A syntonic state is described in the catalogue accompanying the show as a way of being which is in harmony with the surrounding environment. What would it mean to be in sync with our contemporary world of precariousness, of global warming, of species extinction, of refugees fleeing, of impending doom? The phrase is mentioned in Ciara O’ Kelly’s video Procedures for a Prosperous Ecology (2018). This piece mimics stylistically a kind of vaguely narcotic corporate film, a novocained brand promotion. Something is being sold; perhaps a way to be in the world, fluid, seamless and sedated.

Another major reference point in the constellation of Syntonic State is Mark Leckey’s video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999). “Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci. He looks like a still, that man is dressed to kill.’’[1] I have a vague memory of seeing this video before; I remembered the dance floor but not the footage of grey, concrete inner city English life, which could easily be lifted from an Alan Clark film. Gritty realism, juxtaposed with dance floor abandon. Fiorucci was installed in the Electric nightclub venue in Galway, a perfect setting for this video. The piece is resolutely low tech, compiled from analogue footage, often including the time-code, from various clubs and dance floors. It has a woozy quality; the footage is not synced to the soundtrack so the dancers are often out of time with the music. The soundtrack is interspersed with the call and response of the music hall – a hectoring, manic insistence on enjoyment. The film attempts to capture both the euphoria of being lost in music as a collective body on the dance floor and the hallucinatory, paranoiac state of too much drugs, ecstasy’s oceanic womb tripping over into being pinned by the eye of the other.

Laura Ni Fhlaibhin, Helen Hughes and Rosie O Reilly’s works are displayed at Columban Hall, a former congregational church. The space acts as a stage set waiting to be activated, a terminal beach. Deflated beach balls, petrified balloon sausage dogs. Air-in, air-out, pumped up, sucked out. The materials employed include horsehair, latex, stone, wood, wax, leather and mirror. Materials are balanced, hung, propped, leaned, inflated, deflated, painted, stripped and tied. The combination of man-made and natural material is repeated in a number of venues, an allusion to both ancient times and modern plastics. Robert Smithson would seem to be a major influence, teamed with references to pop culture and especially to a 70’s countercultural hippie aesthetic. I have conflated all three artists work together in my mind and remember their work as one installation. This misremembering is encouraged by the exhibition space. Unlike the white cube which functions as a neutral backdrop in which to display individual works, spaces which retain the traces of a former life tend to press more forcibly upon the work prompting other connotations.

Cyprien Gaillard’s Cities of Gold and Mirror (2009) 16mm film is shown in the 126 Gallery space that occupies a bungalow. The darkened space entered after walking through the lashing rain acts as a strange and atmospheric environment in which to watch these assorted scenes – young adults dressed in bikinis and shorts, ‘spring breakers’, engage in drinking games; a man in a red jumpsuit and face mask executes a strange undulating dance with ancient Mayan ruins as a backdrop; a mirrored office block explodes through controlled demolition; a night club lighting show; dolphins frolicking in golden water. The ancient deployed as a stage for leisure, hedonism and cod spiritualism. The soundtrack is a futuristic synth scape from the 80’s, progressing prettily even ecstatically until near the end of each scene when the mood shifts, a note changes the atmosphere to something unsettling, dark. Again there is a compression of different times: the ancient and the modern all manifested in a banal private domestic space which has been opened to a roving public by art, now a strain of the tourism and heritage industry. The clip of the controlled demolition of the huge mirrored building is especially resonant. The shimmering of the mirrored façade caused by internal explosions, approximate the moment a digital image disintegrates into pixels, the medium appearing to signal the impending collapse, a rupture in the field of representation. All these scenes are shot in Cancún, a tourist resort developed by the Mexican government in the 1970’s. The capitalist cycle of creation and destruction works at top speed here.

The evocative pull of cheap pop music is also present in Dennis McNulty’s David (Timefeel) (2018), installed in the TULCA Festival Gallery. This is a work that I would describe as romantic conceptualism. It is formally tight and sparse, comprised of an old, solidly three-dimensional TV monitor placed on a wooden frame, speakers, the various cables trailing on the floor (a trope that is found in a number of artists’ works). A short appropriated video loop plays on the monitor, a clip cut and spliced from the video of I’m on Fire by Bruce Springsteen from the LP Born in the USA (1984). All the romanticism is gleaned from the close-up of Bruce’s face, slowly moving, his eyes turned upwards, a look familiar from religious paintings. It brings to mind the close-ups in Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, a beautiful face turned heavenward. The song is extended over time, looped, dragged out. The sound seeps into and contaminates the gallery space, subtly affecting the other work, producing a feeling of melancholy.

Colin Martin’s series of small-scale oil on canvas paintings collectively entitled Empathy Lab (2018) depict subjects with a relation to technology, surveillance or an uncanny doubling of some kind as in Child Actor 11, Robot. The style is representational but pared back; the colours washed out, reminiscent of both Luc Tuysman’s paintings and Thomas Demand’s photographs.

In the basement space, Jesse Jones’ four minute film, Zarathustra (2008) has been installed: a camera slowly pans over and moves through an abandoned space, a municipal swimming pool condemned to demolition. The camera travels to the source of the soundtrack, the drained swimming pool where a youth brass band warm up and play the opening to Richard Strauss’ tone poem. The youth of the musicians and the dereliction of the surroundings work to puncture the pomposity of the music. The location where the piece was shot and where it is projected resonate with each other: the Fairgreen House unable to actualize its destiny as a ‘high profile commercial unit’ and the public swimming pool condemned as part of the Ballymun regeneration project – both buildings turned over for a period to the production and exhibition of art.

Eleanor McCaughey’s installation The Blood-dimmed tide is loosed (2018) at the Galway Arts Centre is comprised of paintings, textile wall hangings, small sculptural pieces, sound and video. The main focus is a large textile backdrop painted with different patterns reminiscent of Matisse, on which the film of a slowly revolving, rudimentarily constructed figurine is projected. On the floor are various figures made from clay that evoke prehistoric statues. It alludes to homemade altars, a combination of hyper-kitsch, glitter, Lurex and the ancient. It invites interpretation of the relations between the parts but repels understanding. A mask-like artefact/sculpture is placed on a plinth. From a distance the plinth appears to be made of stone but up close it is revealed to be marbled foam. Paintings of the mask and another indeterminate shape are positioned on the opposing wall. This work hints at the infinite proliferation possible from the fetish object when raised in significance by the frame of art.

Gavin Murphy’s essay film Double Movement (2017) is also installed at the Galway Arts Centre. It is a presentation of research that the artist conducted into Busáras in Dublin. This building was constructed in the 1940’s in a modernist style. The film opens with a spinning top and quotes the philosopher Roland Barthes referring to the romance of architecture: “architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience” (i.e. architecture’s double movement). Murphy uses the device of an actor leafing through documents to present the information. A voice-over relays different fragments of narrative by participants in the project. This history clearly contrasts with today, as the idea that the state would invest in the construction of a public building with the highest quality materials and most innovative design is simply preposterous. There was a utopian element in the big public construction projects of the post-war era, during what has been called the ‘Golden Thirty’. This loss of the idea of a better future (or any future) is alluded to throughout Syntonic State. There is a nostalgia displayed for ideas of collectivism, which are located in the pop culture of the recent past. ‘Living for the weekend’ is not even seen as an option now.

Bassam Al-Sabah shows work at the NUIG Gallery. Wandering wandering with a sun on my back (2018) is the centrepiece, a 15-minute animated film. The tone of the film is existential, contrasting with the pretty hued computer generated visuals. A solitary individual seemingly alone in a world gives voice to feelings of great angst. The word “I” is repeated throughout the piece – ‘’I shivered away in the night”; “In front of the sun I fully exist”; ”I fortify my body morphing with the crystalized object”; “I relive my live over and over again’’: “But what if I burn with this already scorched earth’’. Objects pulsate, morph and melt into each other. You Pull Out Swords From All Over Your Body (2018) is a sculptural piece, a small painted Manga clay figure lies on the floor, surrounded by detritus. Expansion Pack (2018) lies slumped in a corner, a largish figure made from holographic leather, the light bounces and refracts off the reflective surface. This space suit could have encased the figure on the floor in the fantasy narrative that is easily constructed around the artefacts. The exhausted character, perhaps a space traveller who has run out of air and is waiting to die.

Walter Benjamin proposed the constellation as a way to think through the relation of ideas to objects. Ideas are no more present in the world than constellations in the skies, but like constellations they enable us to perceive relations between objects. The various artworks exhibited can be reflected on as individual objects but are more generative when read in relation to each other and their local and international context. There is a direct engagement with materials, no grand claims are put forward, elements are taken from commodity culture repurposed and recycled as a means of investigating the state we are in.

Written by Catherine Harty

Catherine Harty is a member of Cork Artists Collective and a director of The Guesthouse Project.

[1] Song lyrics, Sister Sledge, He’s the Greatest Dancer.

Published on: Thursday 13 December 2018

REVIEW: Caitriona Devery | Rabble 15

Shout Shout! Let It All Out!

A woman kneels on a bed, as onlookers observe. Her face is twisted, she emits a guttural bellowing, grunts, thumps herself and spouts expletive-riddled abuse. Primal Screaming doesn’t look like much of a buzz but Caitriona Devery decided to take a plunge into the strange anyway. 

Arthur Janov’s therapeutic invention was all the rage in the 1970’s and is the weird connection between John Lennon and Jenny James, founder of Primal Screaming commune Atlantis. The two were also strongly drawn to the West of Ireland.

The stories of Atlantis’ stint in Donegal and Lennon’s fascination with owning an Irish island have acquired mythical properties over the years and inspired creative expression. Kevin Barry’s 2015 book Beatlebone used Lennon’s interest in Screaming and his purchase of the uninhabited island of Dorinish in Clew Bay to create an inspired work of meta-fiction. In 2017 the TULCA contemporary art exhibition in Galway used James’ Atlantis as a point of departure to explore autonomy, community, selfhood and nature.

Arthur Janov, the founder of Primal Screaming therapy, believed that repressing traumatic experiences from childhood results in dysfunction and neurosis. Participants were encouraged to fully express themselves, physically and even violently. Janov said at the time that the treatment “is not a celebrity therapy. It’s for people who are suffering”, but his cathartic promises inevitably attracted figures in the celebrity world. One of the most famous was Lennon who had sessions with Janov at Tittenhurst Park.

A few year later, in 1974, the Atlantis commune set up shop in a dilapidated house in Burtonport, Co. Donegal. Led by the iconoclastic Jenny James, they were inspired by Janov’s teachings. James believed that society at the time put a premium on “mediocrity, niceness, and being sweet and polite”. At the commune, no emotion was disallowed, in the interests of honesty. They were encouraged to express everything, physically and even violently. 

Was it an escape or an attempt at utopia? Matt Packer, who curated TULCA last year, says “The Screamers were both a rejection of mainstream society and an attempt to create another kind of society. In her books, Jenny James is quite antagonistic about what she saw as the falsity and technocracy of modern living, and in a sense the Screamers were driven by that opposition.”

As you might imagine, the community of truth-seekers caused a ruckus in sleepy 70’s rural Donegal. There were accusations of sexual promiscuity, cultish brainwashing, even kidnapping. Their energetic, loud verbal releases led locals to call them The Screamers. They would last in Burtonport for six tumultuous years before fleeing to a more rudimentary and isolated settlement on the island of Innishfree a few years later. Another similarity with Lennon, who had purchased Dorinish in 1967.

The Screamers brought a frisson of excitement to the Irish airwaves on more than one occasion. Filmmaker Bob Quinn filmed them but RTE deemed the programme too shocking to screen. Quinn called it “the most disturbing filming experience I ever engaged in”. 

Watching now, the disarming 1970’s aesthetic of the house, Brady-bunch haircuts and hippy headbands are at odds with the exorcist like howls and animalistic screaming that were a regular feature of the therapy sessions. There were reports of bullying, even physical abuse.

In Barry’s Beatlebone the characters in the Amethyst hotel, partly based on The Screamers, show the potentially dark dynamics that can arise when conventions are disbanded. I asked Kevin Barry if he thought there was anything genuinely transformative going on during the therapy. 

He said, “I think a lot of what we see in the film is well-intentioned but it’s a pretty loose take on the techniques of Primal Screaming. I look at the footage and think – well at least people were trying things. At least there was a sense of opening up”.

Janov himself said that many interpretation of his ideas were dangerous. He did not endorse Atlantis. Ultimately the scandal around the commune became too much and it dissolved. Core members, including James, sailed off to Colombia to focus less on emotions and more on ecology. 

Barry sees the commune’s influence in the context of the narrow Irish culture of the time. “We can’t forget how fucking dreary and monolithic a place rural Ireland was in the 1970s. So anything challenging or new or downright nutty coming into the place was at a certain level definitely welcome.”

Lennon and James weren’t the only ones to project onto Ireland mystical, otherworldly and escapist properties. Since World War II in particular, Ireland has appealed to Europeans, especially Germans, seeking a pastoral, even spiritual refuge. Is there something in the landscape itself? The freaks and weirdos that were drawn, perhaps, to Ireland’s committed refusal of modernity often imbued it with mythical properties.

This chimes with the images artist Yvette Monahan made of Inishfree for TULCA. They show a landscape haunted with uncanny traces, unclear if they are human or animal. Kevin Barry sees the West’s landscape as holding a certain resonance. 

He said, “there’s a German word something like ‘weltshmerz’ which describes a feeling of homesickness for a place you’ve never been. The West of Ireland has a tendency to stir up such feelings in those who come to stay for a while. It has an odour of melancholy – in the book I called it a kind of ‘deathhauntedness’. I believe there’s something that’s soaked into the bones of the West that makes it a place for elegiacal dreaming.” 

Packer was interested in the particularity of Ireland of that time, and why it become such a focus for the projections of those seeking alternatives, both social and political. He says, “Ireland in the 70’s provided the notion of living off-grid and outside the trappings of mainstream society. That same notion is close to a colonialist viewpoint. It was additionally interesting for me that the region of Donegal where the Screamers’ found home was also a place steeped in Republican activism during a time of peak conflict”.

A steady flow of hippies of all kinds into rural parts of Ireland continued into the 1980’s and 1990’s, New Age travelers, ravers, and ruralists. But perhaps as Ireland finally joined the 20th century, its appeal to these alternative-seekers declined. What happened to the hippies? 

Packer says “I was interested in this question in my initial thinking around TULCA, but at the same time I always understood that it’s not a very exacting question. I was trying to explore the legacy of a particular kind of liberalism that existed in my parents’ generation that seemed to absent today; either absorbed into a broader mainstream culture, or discredited, or else reduced to a lifestyle anachronism”.

Packer offers one argument that pluralism and liberalism have made strides and reduced the need for struggles against a monolithic mainstream. Capitalism’s increasing sophistication since then and its ability to co-opt dropping out may be another. He says perhaps “a genuine refusal of mainstream culture now requires a more extreme approach. After all, the Screamers sailed to Colombia, where they remain today.” 

Both book and curatorial intent explore longings for escape, for truth, in the context of quixotic projections onto the Irish landscape. They show how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same. On this Packer is cautious, and careful not to fetishise the Screamers.

“It was important that the exhibition didn’t patronise the past and the efforts of people that were trying to live differently in the 1960s and 70s. I’ve always tried to resist that kind of approach, and I think it’s actually quite dangerous to imply the immutability of our present moment”.

In Rabble 15, Print Edition by Caitriona Devery. September 24, 2018

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry was published by Canongate in 2015
Image credits: Yvette Monahan

REVIEW: Declan Long | Frieze

The Tulca Festival 2017 finds inspiration in a ragged band of ’70s counter-cultural free-thinkers known for their practice of primal therapy.

Hippie cults, it’s fair to say, are not for everyone. Fascination with their ostensibly liberated lifestyles and wild, sometimes sinister, fantasies – their preposterous escape plans from the modern maelstrom – is nonetheless entirely understandable. Who doesn’t, as the sometimes sinister Philip Larkin once wrote, feel occasional envy for the ‘audacious, purifying / Elemental move’, of those, who ‘chucked up everything / And just cleared off’? (Even, in his case, the dead.)

For the 2017 edition of the Tulca exhibition in Galway – an annual mini-festival of contemporary art, spread across multiple venues – curator Matt Packer has found inspiration in the fraught history of one such alternative scene. This is the Atlantis commune, a ragged band of counter-cultural free-thinkers who established a base in the small Donegal town of Burtonport during the 1970s and whose extreme, Wilhelm Reich-influenced practices of primal therapy earned them the tabloid nickname of ‘The Screamers’. Packer’s interest was piqued, in part, by an insider’s account of the commune written by its charismatic, disarmingly upbeat leader, Jenny James – a book published in the wake of assorted controversies that dogged the group during their time in Donegal. But at Tulca our main introduction to the Atlantis story comes with The Family, a 1979 documentary made by the revered Irish filmmaker Bob Quinn.

Quinn’s film – originally commissioned by RTE (Ireland’s national broadcaster) but quickly deemed too shocking for television – enters the intimate world of the Screamers’ house, granting us, first of all, a view of cheerful, generous communal living, before revealing the private hell of the primal therapy sessions. The participants – cooped-up and cornered in claustrophobic bedrooms — are performatively pressed, pestered and bullied into states of uncontrolled anger. The declared intent is a cathartic release of repressed anxieties, or a therapeutic exorcism of socially imposed inhibitions. The immediate effects, as we witness them, are deeply disturbing – most of all during one harrowing sequence in which a male resident of the house harasses, teases and grapples with James’s howling teenage daughter. In turn, he too is pressured and humiliated by the other observing adults – among them James herself – not for his abusive behaviour, but for failing to go further, to push harder.

In choosing to screen Quinn’s extraordinary, upsetting film, and in taking James’s book as a point of departure, Packer has not sought to create an exhibition solely focused on the phenomenon of primal therapy or even, more broadly, on the radical, questionable aspirations and lifestyles of alternative communities. Certain works do engage directly with therapeutic situations or opportunities. Liz Magic Laser’s hypnotic, depressing film Primal Speech (2016), for instance, brings a group of actors together to vent about traumatic formative experiences and present-day, post-Brexit, post-Trump worries. Voice Piece for Soprano, a 1961 work by Yoko Ono (presented on take-away cards, available at the University Hospital) invites anyone and everyone to freely scream ‘against the wind’, ‘against the wall’ or ‘against the sky’. (A work that might be usefully presented at the exit door of many international biennials.) David Beattie’s spare, elegant installation Propositional Things (2017) – a kind of post-minimalist yoga studio, combining potted plants with steel slabs – promises to harness the precious ‘orgone energy’ desired by Reich and his disciples. But beyond such specific, cathartic connections, the Screamers’ story becomes a compelling compare-and-contrast reference point for an array of other artworks that variously allude to extreme states or unorthodox communal scenarios.

Shown alongside Quinn’s The Family at the Galway Arts Centre, a purposefully squalid installation by Lucy Stein entitled Inflating the Goddess (2017) – partially comprising esoteric graffiti, grimy strung-up washing, and an inflatable swan, scrawled with shit-coloured markings – is suitably abject and unsettling in its presentation of an evocatively occultish domestic scene. And yet, the scene has a material lightness too: nothing here seems finally fixed in time, space or meaning. At the same venue, the swirling patterns in drawings by Sam Basu suggest an effort to channel weird, irrational impulses; a moodily contemplative film by Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain meditates on uneasy rural isolation; and Fabienne Audeoud’s three-hour video of vocal exercises (Practice, 1998) centres on bodily and psychological testing, exploring the limits of expressive capability. The manic, hyper-intensity of Audeoud’s arduous, eccentric performance is horribly, hysterically gripping.

We see Audeoud’s work again at Tulca: the second time as part of a beautifully arranged group show at the former Connacht Tribune Print Works. Here Audeoud shows a selection of hanging, transparent, assemblage-paintings that feature peculiar, comical faces. These grinning, gurning personalities punctuate a room scattered with other partial, implied or depicted figures: costumes for a new community by Oisin Byrne; wonderfully wonky, trashy and inchoate sculptural forms by Kian Benson Bailes; outline drawings of participants in a fantastical, carnivalesque procession by Kaspar Oppen Samuelsen and Marie-Louise Vittrup. There is an evident ebullience to all this work – and other marvelous contributions such as Ciarán Ó’Dochartaigh’s Druid Love Triangle (2017), a lurid pink contraption made from antique massage tools – that seems a long way from the determined aggression and necessary anger of the Screamers. Of course, at certain moments in Bob Quinn’s film, the group came across as innocent, hopeful and carefree too. They were shown as giddily excited about the new, alternative social world they wanted to create – while remaining willfully, perversely blind to the terrible darkness at the heart of their utopian dream.

The Tulca Festival of Visual Arts 2017 in Galway, Ireland runs until 19 November.

Main image: Lucy Stein, Inflating the Goddess, 2017, installation view, Tulca Festival of Visual Arts 2017, Galway. Courtesy: Tulca Festival of Visual Arts 2017, Galway; photograph: © Jonathan Sammon

Declan Long

Declan Long is programme director of the MA course Art in the Contemporary World at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin, Ireland.

REVIEW: Aidan Dunne | The Irish Times

Disappearing islands and a planet on the edge

Galway’s annual winter arts festival is, fittingly enough, all about the weather.

TULCA 2015: Seachange 

The Festival Gallery, Connaught Tribune Print Works, Market Street; Galway Arts Centre, Dominick Street; Nuns Island Theatre; 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Flood Street; University Hospital, Newcastle Road; James Mitchell Museum, the Quadrangle, NUI Galway

TULCA is Galway’s winter festival of visual arts. This year’s guest curator, Mary Cremin, decided on a big theme: Earth’s environmental future. Hence, Seachange, featuring more than 30 Irish and international artists. And that’s not the whole story, Cremin notes: at its core, Seachange focuses on the legendary island of Hy-Brasil.

An Atlantis-like mythology developed around the elusive island, said to be located off the west coast of Ireland. Ambiguous early accounts of its existence and endless speculation were eventually dispelled by 19th-century surveys. No island could be found, although the relatively shallow Porcupine Bank, with its pure cold-water coral reefs, was discovered, and it seemed like a good candidate. Hy-Brasil, meanwhile, retains its symbolic power.

Winter is the right season and Galway the right location to gather artistic responses to climate change, especially over a weekend of gale-force winds and driving rain. Cremin looks at the way that now, in what has been popularly but not yet officially dubbed the Anthropocene era, human beings are accelerating irreversible environmental change on a global scale yet have minimal evident interest in where change will leave us, despite some tentative political initiatives.

Rising tides

A disappearing island is nothing compared with the plight of some 200 million people being displaced by rising sea levels within 50 years.

All of which is most vividly expressed in Nuns Island Theatre, where Maria McKinney’s stacked pillar forms are backed by Clare Langan’s film Floating World, in which Skellig Michael, piercing the clouds, can be seen as standing in for Hy-Brasil. Two other places feature: high-rises in Dubai float on a sea of clouds; and, on Montserrat, habitations are swallowed up by volcanic ash in the exclusion zone.

The images are ravishing, the mood post-apocalyptic. McKinney’s pillars, accretions of expanded foam, fruit nets, false nails, cement, steel rod and pipes, are called Abyssals, referring to a deep, close-to-freezing layer of the ocean. In this context, it’s tempting to see them as cold- water coral reefs.

The overall installation is completed by Ruth Lyons’s carved rock salt bowls and Martin Healy’s evocations of our tiny scale in relation to those infinite heavenly spaces.

At Galway Arts Centre, Anaïs Tondeur’s Lost in Fathoms is the story of another island that disappeared, Nuuk in the Arctic. Tondeur pieces together a plausible narrative of its discovery in the 18th century and the establishment of a scientific observation station, which transmitted data until 2012. “Coincidentally,” we are told, “the final signal from Nuuk arrived just as the 34th International Geological Congress was meeting in Australia to discuss the emergence of a new, human-influenced geological age.”

The timing is a just a little too convenient, but in fact Tondeur spent a year researching (with physicist Jean-Marc Chomaz) how islands can and do disappear. She has created a compelling, atmospheric fiction.

Healing waters

In the space directly above Tondeur, Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet’s film The Waterway is a much lighter entertainment. Here seawater therapy promises rejuvenation and, with surprising ease, transformation and eternal life.

It would be hard to better the Connaught Tribune Print Works as a gallery. Richard Long’s Kilkenny Limestone Circle, 4m in diameter, looks comfortably at home there. Cremin sees Long’s practice of undertaking long solo treks in remote locations and making works with ordinary found materials, especially stone and mud, as a good example of how we need to rethink our relationship with the natural world.

But how much of the natural world is left? Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris chart the course of a Californian river from its source through its management and multiple uses. As they put it, it’s no longer a river at all, but a resource that, from beginning to end, is captured, owned, manipulated and exhausted. A bit like the wolves we see – presumably in a wolf sanctuary – in Michael John Whelan’s elegiac From the Mountain, which takes its cue from the extermination of the Irish wolf.

Both Owen Quinlan and Maggie Madden use found materials associated with the sea. Although the former is best known as a ceramic artist, his Time and Place marshals a wealth of finds from shoreline walks – pebbles, bones, fragments of wood and other waterborne debris – packed in neat rectangles.

Madden has always used found and recycled materials and does so here for her two three-dimensional drawings. Undersea joins a washed-up length of twine with a piece of optical fibre communications cable. The impossibly precarious Shelter implies that a state of benign balance is a fragile thing.

Seachange shines a light on the James Mitchell Geology Museum at NUI Galway. Once part of a more substantial natural history museum, now disbanded and long neglected, the geology museum has avoided extinction and has, with government funding, been restored and refurbished.

With her book The Water Glossary, Carol Anne Connolly has made something beautiful. She has gathered together Irish terms for water in different contexts. The result is amazingly rich and descriptive of the landscape and the weather, not to mention very useful in the circumstances.

Aidan Dunne
The Irish Times