TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is pleased to announce the contributors to its 2023 exhibition programme, titled honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais.
The contributors to honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise are Áine O’Hara, Aisling-Ór Ní Aodha, Anna Roberts-Gevalt, Bog Cottage, Bridget O’Gorman, Edward Lawrenson & Pia Borg, Holly Márie Parnell, Jamila Prowse, Jenny Brady, Leila Hekmat, Nat Raha, P. Staff, Paul Roy, Philipp Gufler, Rouzbeh Shadpey, Sarah Browne and Sean Burns.
Taking its title from the description of an Irish folk cure, honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise responds to the evolving experiences of disability and medicine in the West of Ireland. It reflects on how ideas around health and treatment can shape landscapes and communities. The festival is dedicated to Ballinasloe born artist J.J. Beegan, who made drawings recalling home while living at Netherne Mental Health Hospital in Surrey, England.
During the festival, you will find sounds, drawings, films, quilts, sculptures, performances, social spaces and paintings throughout Galway city and county. There are prints that express the experience of disability with ironic wit and dreamy soundscapes that we wish we could hear from our sick beds.
There are films dedicated to loved ones through memories of illness and music, and the longing and access barriers of returning home as a disabled person. There are quilt weaving archives of disabled artists and others that celebrate queer artists and scholars whose lives were pathologised or touched by medicine.
Paintings visit sites of medical incarceration and we spend time with a group of young people who reimagine these sites through a neurodiverse lens. There are stories of how chemotherapy changes how we see ourselves, and others that transport us to a surrealist hospital for women that delves into the comedy and self-discovery of malady.
We are brought to tower blocks in Birmingham as havens of queer life and witness the inhabitants’ history with HIV and AIDS. We will also share in the intimacy of a memory test for dementia through the retelling of Iranian resistance films. Other spaces are transformed into Faery Forts that create spaces of softness and play, re-enchanting a familiar landscape and sculptures built upon the support and collaboration necessary to create.
Iarlaith Ní Fheorais said, “It has been a joy to spend more time at home in Galway curating this year’s TULCA Festival, reflecting with artists on the many ways the experience of disability and medicine can shape places and communities, here in the west and elsewhere. It’s been such a nourishing process, and I’m over the moon to share the compelling and tender work of the artists in this year’s programme.”
TULCA 2023: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise will run from 3-19 November 2023 across multiple venues in Galway city and county.
