Welcome wave of visual arts in the west

Although Galway has a high cultural profile, visual arts have been somewhat neglected. But the new festival Tulca has ambitions to turn the tide, writes Aidan Dunne

Tulca, which officially runs until November 9th at various venues in and close to Galway, is a visual arts festival - a new one. It is the first of what the organisers hope will be an annual series. A reasonable response to that news is to point out that Galway already has an annual arts festival, and a good, extremely popular one at that. But, as Chris Coughlan, one of the instigators of Tulca and chairman of the Galway Arts Centre, sees it, the visual emphasis of Tulca sets it apart. It provides a concentration not found elsewhere in Galway's cultural landscape.

There is a great deal of truth to that. While Galway enjoys a high cultural profile, the visual arts have not been central. For many years the arts festival was hard put to find reasonable venues for its visual arts strand. Minor, unprepossessing exhibition spaces have found themselves elevated to star status. NUI Galway, for example, has a small subterranean gallery that has hosted some illustrious exhibitions. Michael D. Higgins's tenure as minister for the arts saw a substantial overhaul of the Dominick Street Arts Centre so that it now boasts a series of handsome, versatile exhibition spaces.

What Galway does not have is a municipal gallery, an obvious lack if you look at the city in the context of the western chain of municipal centres including Cork, Limerick and Sligo, not to mention the development of the municipal collection in Letterkenny.

It would make a great deal of sense for the city to have a gallery where visitors might go to see artworks representative of one of the most culturally celebrated regions of the country - one which, after all, vitally shaped the iconography of our national identity.

In the meantime, a focus on the visual arts in Galway has to be a good idea. To describe Tulca as a festival is probably stretching the term a bit. It is, as Coughlan acknowledges, a "modest start", though one that has a number of exemplary qualities and that suggests tremendous levels of enthusiasm, energy and commitment. To that extent, the name Tulca, which translates as "wave, flood, deluge, gust, gush, outpouring", is appropriate.

Tulca's centrepiece exhibition is a touring show of contemporary European art that originated last year in the German city of Jena, perhaps best known as the birthplace of the early Romantic movement and by virtue of the legend "Carl Zeiss - Jena" engraved on various superior optical products. In fact, the exhibition, which coincided with the 200th anniversary of the death of the writer, Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known by his pen name Novalis, seems to have been organised to bolster an awareness of Jena's historical identity, particularly with regard to the development of romantic ideas. Rather awkwardly titled IMAGINATION - Romantik, it looked for a thematic response from 13 participating artists. Thematic or not, the end product contrives to be a thoroughly typical example of a contemporary international group exhibition, with the requisite cross-section of media and quirkiness. The artists responded to the romantic theme with differing levels of engagement, and in terms of relevance it is fair that Mariele Neudecker won the award that was up for grabs. Her eerie three-dimensional scale model of a Caspar David Friedrich landscape, complete with mist and rocky mountain peaks, is a striking piece of work. But so too is her disjointed two-screen video, Waterfall, in which we see a reflection of the waterfall of the title in two close-up eyes.

Also thematically focused, though, is Portuguese artist Rui Chafes's Dawn, in which a black iron orb - the sun? - floats impossibly above the ground. Like its accompanying biomorphic drawings, it is a strange, compelling work. Serge Comte's dreamy video is atmospherically strong, although Herr Zeiss probably wouldn't have approved of its hazy, blurred optical style. Lori Hersberger's illuminated text piece, about a yearning for possibility, works quite well. In fact, most of the work is perfectly okay, but apart from that mentioned, not much gives you pause. Without being unduly harsh, it seems that musing on the beginnings of European Romanticism didn't exactly set the imaginations of this bunch of artists on fire.

The main home-produced show is The Language of Drawing, here mostly taken to mean drawing at one remove from the conventional idea of finished, definitive work, and it is an enormously enjoyable experience. Not least because there is an incredible feeling of generosity to the way the participating artists invest so much of their skill, and of themselves, in works many of which, one suspects, are not necessarily meant to see the inside of a gallery.

To start with there are Brian Bourke's extraordinary sketchbooks which, on the evidence here, are filled with what are finished works by any other name, perfectly realised images made with unrivalled skill and spontaneity. Much the same holds true of Jay Murphy's sketches of the Italian circus which appeared in Galway.

These presumably formed the basis for a series of more conventionally finished paintings, but the drawings are unquestionably better. There are masses of studies by Padraic Reaney that evidence the daily grind people do not usually associate with being an artist, and that could be seen as reflecting an ongoing internal battle between knowledge and instinct.

Michael Dempsey's worked and re-worked charcoal heads also convey a sense of making art as a steady, disciplined labour and a search for the image that finally seems right. At the City Library, a section of The Language of Drawing blends nicely with Clare Fox's Motion, a drawing-centred exhibition that takes a dynamic approach to depicting the human body. There are other nice touches around town, as with the paintings drafted into AIB's Lynch's Castle branch from its collection.

Significantly, there is an emphatic participatory character to Tulca. It cannot be accused of taking its audience for granted and has organised a packed programme of workshops, lectures (including a presentation by American academic Greg Sholette), artists' talks and interviews (Rui Chafes, Nigel Rolfe and Clare Langan, Brian Bourke and Michael Dempsey).

Coughlan is surely on the right track when he says that Tulca would like to develop a specific vision of Galway as "the City of Water and Light" (as opposed, perhaps, to The City of Pubs and Car Parks). His suggestion is that artists might engage with these two characteristics: the network of waterways and the endlessly shifting sea light that between them contribute so much to the city's atmosphere and identity.

Experience suggests, however, that the proposal to create a permanent visual art installation in the city annually under the auspices of Tulca should be approached cautiously. If experience of public art has taught us anything, it is that there is a lot to be said for temporary installations.

Tulca ends November 9th. Details of exhibitions and related events, and comprehensive programmes, are available from Galway Arts Centre, Dominick Street. Tel: 091 565886 or www.galwayartscentre.ie