Six artists from Galway City’s Engage Studios will exhibit their work in the Niland Gallery, in Niland House on Merchant’s Road as part of Tulca 2010, Galway’s festival of visual arts..

The participating artists – Jennifer Cunningham, Maria Brennan, Cecilia Danell, Maeve Curtis, Miriam Donohue and Eimear Jean McCormack – are all showing work that was inspired by the coastal region of Galway.

Featuring island life, marine life, climatic change and the Galway cityscape, the exhibition serves to demonstrate the diverse range of practices among the Engage artists, while also showing how the location of Galway can often inspire the artists’ work.

For instance a depopulated island has inspired award-winning artist Jennifer Cunningham’s video piece, Island which was made during the artist’s residency on the now uninhabited island of Inishlacken, off Roundstone. Inishlacken has inspired many artists over the years and Jennifer’s work is the outcome of The Inishlacken Project curated by Rosie McGurran. Island looks at themes of emigration and relocation to the mainland and the piece features a poem written by Anna O’Toole, a native of Inishlacken, who immigrated to America in the early part of the twentieth century.

Taking the cityscape of Galway as a starting point, Swedish artist Cecilia Danell has made a stop-motion video for Tulca, which shows an alternative route out to Mutton Island through the concrete beehive shapes that make up the causeway. This work reflects Dannell’s interest in man-made structures that remain largely overlooked, but which upon closer examination prove visually stimulating. Also inspired by the cityscape of Galway, Miriam Donoghue will exhibit a piece entitled Rust Mountain which looks at a Galway landmark as a place of infinite possibility, as a place of abandoned treasure, of disturbing beauty, as a docking place for the unwanted.

Marine life has shaped Carlow artist Maria Brennan’s installation for Tulca of pod-like structures. Porifera explores living on the remote edge of Europe, where the idea of self-protection and survival can become insular and isolating. Porifera combines the biology of sea sponges and an allegorical look at regeneration and fragmentation.
Also influenced by marine life and climatic change, well-known artist Maeve Curtis exhibits Turn, the remnant of a performative arena where the energetic and rhythmic forces of tidal currents are played out through the meeting of contesting surfaces. Curtis currently has a solo show at Norman Villa Gallery in Salthill.

Originally from Cork, artist and printmaker Eimear Jean McCormack has exhibited widely in Ireland as well as New York, London, France and China. McCormack will exhibit drawings and prints based on climatic changes and contrasts them against human activities contributing to land alteration.

The Niland Gallery will open daily from 12pm-7pm until November 21. Admission to the exhibition is free, for full Tulca programme details see www.tulca.ie