TULCA’s Artist Talks Series returns for this year’s programme The Salvage Agency curated by Michele Horrigan. Continuing its longstanding partnership with ATU School of Design and Creative Arts, TULCA will host presentations by three exhibiting artists every Tuesday beginning on 5 November 2024. This year’s series will take place at ATU Wellpark Road and 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.