Galway International Arts Festival
After being on my wishlist for a number of years, I finally attended the Galway International Arts Festival this July.
Of course, this being Ireland in the middle of summer, it was raining so heavily the day I went to Galway that I wondered whether some outdoor events would get cancelled.
A friend and I were really looking forward to seeing the parade called Pegasus, which included an acrobatic show with music and dance featuring a large mechanical horse with wings.
The parade
The Pegasus parade by the French collective Planète Vapeur started in Eyre Square under heavy rain and it featured a mechanical horse maneuvred by a woman in a tractor-style cabin, drummers, dancers on stilts, a live singer in a long dress that covered an elevated wheeled structure and an aerial acrobat who was literally risking her life hanging off and doing acrobatics around a hoola-hoop without any safety net or rope on top of the mechanical horse.
Thankfully, the show went ahead, marching at a slow pace through the Latin Quarter and ending by the Spanish Arch overlooking the river Corrib.
Visual art
My friend and I made a plan to see three venues in one afternoon plus the parade. The first exhibition space was just off the main street in a hangar-type place displaying Patricia Piccinini’s
exhibition “We Travel Together”, a thought-provoking and unsettling animal and human statues that looked both realistic and completely fantastical. The main concept of the installation was “care and it was very well developed into a short video where the animal figures recreated in sculpture were put together with live action footage and an actress who rescued one of them.
A short walk away near Market Street was another hangar-type space at Printworks displaying large canvases by Bernadette Kiely. Her exhibition was entitled “Don’t Need No Country, Don’t Fly No Flag”.
The key concept was climate change and the many floodings that affect the lives of people. The paintings depicted both zoomed-in images for flowers, for example, and aerial views of flooded streets in a washed-out colour scheme.
Next to the paintings exhibition was a darkened room showing a short film by Yvonne McGuinness who has been exploring the relationship between natural space and architecture, highlighting the beauty of concrete buildings and how taste is a matter of personal preference rather than a universal standard. Her video installation was called What’s Left Us Then and it explored ruins, building sites and quarries making the audience think about the effects of human construction on the environment and how buildings relate to their surroundings.
A longer walk in the rain took us to Galway University in the Studios where had a number of paintings on display. Brian Burke, originally from Dublin but now living in Connemara, near Galway, has had a long career in the arts. Due to his extensive output, his artworks, both old and new and put together in an exhibition entitled Agenbite of Inwit, were displayed within the University main building and in the Studios, which are dedicated spaces for visual and performing arts.
His art is influenced by classic paintings from the Renaissance as well as African art and sculpture.
Many visual arts programmes also included talks by the artists themselves; unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend them this time, but hopefully I will in the coming editions.
Overall impressions
I must say, I was so impressed with how well organised everything was, how friendly and professional the volunteers were and the quality of the exhibitions and other events. You could really see that the people who were involved in setting up the various events took great pride in what they did and demonstrated a real love for the arts with a healthy dose of Irish hospitality.
Even with incessant rain, Galway delivered a magical atmosphere. Such a shame house prices are so high because Galway was on my shortlist of places I wanted to live in!
Tell me, do you like visual arts? Have you been to an interesting exhibition recently? Please let me know in the comments.
Sounds fab but then Galway always is. What did you do on Culture Night last Friday?