TULCA festival of art shows importance of collaboration
Arts Week with Judy Murphy
Critically-acclaimed artist and writer Bridget O’Gorman is presenting new work in Galway City this week as part of the annual TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. Support | Work is an installation involving sculptures and text, shines a light on how someone who is disabled can inform society about access and support, and it reflects on what shared support means for artists. It’s in the festival gallery in the Hynes Building, St Augustine Street, Galway City, until November 11. The TULCA festival runs until Sunday, November 19.
Support | Work reflects on what it means to support people and to be supported – and ultimately how our behaviour affects other people. It includes large-scale mobile sculptures that Bridget created, using found and fabricated media, using pulleys, parts from mobility aids, and hoists.
The artist, whose work explores the instability of objects and bodies, recently reached an impasse in the way she operates due to the deterioration of a permanent spinal injury known as Cauda Equina Syndrome.
“As a newly disabled artist, I will be working with a support worker for the first time as part of my practice,” she explains. “This is one expression of the many formal and informal collaborators in an artist's practice. Collective support is integral to how artists operate. Support | Work will open this process to the public.”
This theme of this year’s TULCA festival, curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais, is honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise and it will take place in venues across Galway from November 3-19
Its title comes from the description of an Irish folk cure, honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise and is about creating spaces where people can sit with artworks that deal with disability, medicine, and home.
This year’s TULCA is responding to the evolving experience of disability and medicine in the West of Ireland, according to Iarlaith. It also addresses the legacy of institutions such as St Brigid’s Mental Health Hospital and how ideas of health and treatment can shape landscapes and communities.
Pictured: Echo's Bones a collaborative film-making project by Sarah Browne with autistic young people from Dublin, will be shown at TULCA.