Creative Arts Centre hosts lectures as part of Tulca Festival

GMIT’s Centre for the Creative Arts & Media is hosting a number of public events as part of the Tulca Festival, launched in Galway city on Friday evening (9 November) by the new head of the GMIT Centre for Creative Arts & Media, Sarah Searson.

Tulca 2012, curated by Gregory McCartney, brings together 41 artists in ten locations in Galway city and country for events including talks, tours and workshops and a public art installation in Inish Bearacháin in Connemara. The three GMIT events in the GMIT Centre for Creative Arts & Media (Cluain Mhuire campus) take place on Monday 12 November, Thursday 13 November and Friday week, 21 November.

The first event is a public talk by artist Kelly Richardson on Monday 12 November, 3.30pm, in the White Room. Kelly Richardson has been in numerous contemporary art biennials including Beiijing, Busan, Gwangju and has been acquired by major museums including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (USA), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (USA), Musee d’’art contemporain de Montreal (Canada) and Art Gallery of Ontario (Canada). Born in Canada, she has lived and worked in the UK since 2003.

The second event is a talk by artist Eve Vaughan, in conjunction with Gallery 126, who will give a talk entitled ‘Out in the Open’, an artist’s insight into creating performance for public spaces. This will take place on Thursday 13 November, 4.30pm in the White Room. Eve Vaughan makes art between live art and contemporary theatre; designing, devising, performing and directing. She works primarily in public spaces and has presented work as part of festivals and with the support of art galleries in Galway, Belfast, Dublin, Glasgow, Amsterdam, New York and London. Eve graduated with an honours degree in Contemporary Theatre Practice at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire in Glasgow in 2009.

The third public event in GMIT, as part of Tulca 2012, is The Interview on Wednesday week, 21 November at 4.30pm in the White Room. Tulca Curator Gregory McCartney will be interviewed by the Tulca Chairperson and Galway Arts Centre Arts Officer Maeve Mulrennan. Greg McCartney is from and based in Derry. He is the Project Co-ordinator and Editor of the Abridged poetry/art magazine. He is a former Director of the Context Gallery and is also a freelance exhibition-maker. He is a member of the Void, Derry, curatorial committee, the Catalyst, Belfast archive committee and a member of the NI Literature Forum. Forthcoming projects include projects for the Derry/Londonderry City of Culture celebrations in 2013. He holds a PhD from the University of Ulster.

Sarah Searson, Head of the GMIT Centre for Creative Arts & Media, formally opened the Tulca 2012 Festival on Friday, 9 November in the Fairgreen House, Galway City.

“Tulca is one of the most important city arts events for our students and staff and the Institute has worked closely with organisers of the festival for many years. GMIT is proud to have internationally renowned film maker Vivienne Dick, a GMIT Film & Documentary lecturer, on the board of Tulca. Seven of our graduates have been selected for this year’s festival.”

About Sarah Searson: Sarah Searson was appointed head of the newly formed Centre for Creative Arts and Media at GMIT in August 2012. She is a Fine Art graduate of DIT and practiced for several years in New York before returning to Ireland to study Cultural Policy and Arts Management at UCD, and later gaining a Master's in Public Culture Studies at IADT.

She has written and implemented arts policy and programme development for numerous organisations including The Arts Council, Dublin City Council, Galway City Council, Visual Artists Ireland and many others. She has contributed arts and cultural elements to several local authority development pans and developed local area arts strategies, most recently the arts policy for the Grangegorman Development Agency, the statutory body supporting the development of a new 73 acre campus in Dublin City. Her own creative work includes writing, curating, mentoring and project development with artists. See: www.sarahsearson.com. She has developed and co-edited a national information project about Public Art in Ireland, www.publicart.ie, and advised on the development of a parallel resource project in the area of Arts and Health, www.artsandhealth.ie She is also co-editor of the national public art guidelines and has written about mentoring practices for artists in Ireland.

Read more about the 2012 Tulca festival www.tulca.ie