Tulca earns its keep

Launched last year, Tulca, Galway's festival of visual art, doesn't use the word "annual" in its title, but on present evidence it could, cautiously, do so. Visual Arts: Although modest in scope, Tulca 2003 is proof of exceptional determination, enthusiasm and commitment by those involved in its organisation and delivery, writes Aidan Dunne

Between its arts festival and Cúirt, Galway is not short of big events; the significance of Tulca is its exclusive concentration on the visual arts and an underlying ambition to raise their profile in Galway.

Clearly mounted within the constraints of a limited budget, it still boasts a lively, diverse programme, with some resourceful thinking along the way. Good to report, as well, that while artists from abroad feature in several exhibitions, the festival highlights several extremely impressive local or locally based artists. These include the photographer Lorraine Tuck, who is based in Oughterard, the printmaker Jennifer Cunningham, the painter and printmaker Fergus Delargy and the sculptor Aisling O'Beirn.

It's impossible to mention these artists without mentioning exhibition venues. O'Beirn's work Home Town is ingeniously and necessarily embedded in the fabric of the city. Well, most of it. Her idea was to manufacture nameplates identifying streets by their colloquial rather than official titles. Hence The Lazy Wall, so dubbed because people habitually leant against it. The inhabitants of Flea Lane took exception to the appellation, however, and that plate now resides in Galway Arts Centre. Even though gardaí were happy with it, someone also took a violent turn against Mill Street Blues, as the Garda station is known, and went to some trouble to prise it off the railings. But in a way the controversy and the rough and tumble are integral to the nature of O'Beirn's project. The Garda station also houses Paul Maye's Fictional Portraits, disturbingly convincing composite portraits of non-existent people.

Cunningham's prints, showing at the Town Hall Theatre gallery under the title Flight, are beautiful works made with great precision and delicacy of line, and they deserve a more sensitive venue. The space they occupy is not really a gallery. It's one thing when an artist sets out to tailor a work to a public space beyond the confines of the gallery, quite another when work needs a relatively neutral context to be appreciated.

There's a bit of both in Delargy's Artwork For A Room, a site-specific piece in Galway Arts Centre's top gallery. He addresses the room with a minimally stated drawing installation that takes the handsome black mantelpiece as a reference. His work, which echoes and frames the fireplace, engages with the architecture of the space very effectively. It may seem inadequate to say that he makes us intensely aware of the space, but that is what he does, and it should be experienced to be appreciated.

The main show at the centre is Argentine Perspectives, by eight printmakers. The gallery is an extremely good venue, and although this is by no means a bad show, and is interesting throughout, it does come across as something of a generic print show, featuring sets of work of a fairly standardised, portable size, technically capable but also conventional to the point of tameness.

Néstor Goyanos engineers some complex mixing and layering of imagery and patterns in two of his Tree Of Identity works; Carlos Scannapieco's stylised street and other scenes have a nice, curiously retro quality; Adrián Pandolfo is good on starkly contrasting patterns; Pablo Delfini's composites strike off in an interesting direction. But on the whole the work doesn't particularly need the space and quality of the venue devoted to it.

At City Hall, Architecture At The Edge, which documents innovative Irish architectural projects along the western seaboard, is an invaluable exhibition. Co-ordinated by the architect Patrick McCabe, it incorporates a wide range of buildings, from private houses and retail spaces to huge public developments. The latter include Murray O'Laoire's dramatic landmark Learning Resource Centre on the Dublin Road campus of Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology - where, as it happens, you can see a show of Michael Cullen's large-scale paintings on carpets.

Against a background of the controversy about one-off rural housing, it is as well to remember that apart from the issue of siting, the character and quality of the buildings in and outside of towns are huge problems. "Unfortunately," as McCabe writes, "most houses fail to respond to context and rely on pattern-book banality and meaningless pastiche." The uncompromisingly contemporary houses he includes in the show are all too rare exceptions.

Simon J. Kelly & Partners' apartment block on Earl's Island, a fairly prominent location, is a salutary corrective to the expanses of characterless apartments in the city. The Galway Schools Project, by the same architects, comes across as a fine example of sensitive, user-friendly design.

Further north, McCullough Mulvin's Dungloe District Offices, in Co Donegal, are a beacon in a county that has seen a horrendous amount of maladroit development at every level. The practice's one-stop shop in Tubbercurry, Co Sligo, suggests imagination and audacity need not be confined to large-scale public projects. This is a show that should be seen throughout the regions it covers.

The cunningly concealed gallery at NUI Galway features a quirky, engrossing exhibition that presents us with a diverse body of work while withholding information about the artists.

Compulsion: The Undeniable Urge To Create explores the creative impulse in a range of practitioners, some obviously professional artists, some not. All share a focused, insistent quality, evidently in thrall to particular areas of subject matter. As Dr Patricia Noone notes in a foreword to the show, this subject matter comes from deep within the person, at a subconscious level, and demands expression. In this regard, such terms as outsider or professional have little relevance.

Brian Bourke had a hand in Compulsion, and his own obsessive reworking of a motif is fully evident in a display of his remarkable suite Women Giving Birth To Men at the institute of technology's Cluain Mhuire campus. Previously seen at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin, the work is here displayed in a continuous line, building to a symphonic whole of interacting colour harmonies and patterns. It's accompanied by Pádraic Reaney's photographic record of the artist making the suite, then installing it at the Taylor.

That's by no means all there is to Tulca. Beate Oehmann's huge abstract banners are imaginatively sited in University College Hospital; Joe Magill's deadpan conceptual puns are at the airport; work from the AIB collection, featuring Ruth McHugh, Alice Maher, Rita Duffy, Mark Francis and Sarah Walker, can be seen at the Lynch's Castle branch; Nils-Udo's photographs go back to their source at the Sean Scoil in Inverin. And there's more. More than enough to suggest that Tulca has earned its keep.

Tulca continues until October 31st. Programmes are available at Galway Arts Centre and throughout the city