Event
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is coming to University Hospital Galway. The festival, which opens on 14 November 2015 in venues around Galway, will include Rhona Byrne’s installation ‘It’s all up in the air’ at UHG. The installation comprises balloons shaped into a sculpture and suspended from the ceiling of the main foyer. TULCA’s 2015 curator Mary Cremin chose the piece with a healthcare setting in mind, leading from this year’s theme of Seachange.
Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust partners with TULCA Festival of Visual Arts each year to bring a new piece of exciting, challenging art to the hospital setting. ‘It’s all up in the air’ will be exhibited in the hospital foyer from 13 November for six weeks.
It’s All Up in the Air, 2015
This work plays with binaries, it is both ephemeral and tangible, serious and absurd. Humour and anxiety are inherent in the piece as it floats suspended within the architecture of the hospital. Within the context of the hospital and framework of the TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Seachange, ‘It’s all up in the air’ relates to tensions and unknown futures. How does a hospital function in the context of a natural disaster? It is a visualisation of a scrambled and confused brain cloud, a heightened awareness of where you are and the precarious nature of existence. Hovering in the foyer, it invites a pause as one enters and allows for conversations on conflicting notions of what it means, but ‘It’s all up in the air’.
About the artist
Rhona Byrne lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. Rhona makes sculptural objects and spatial environments combining sculpture, performance and processes of participation that explore a negotiation of object, place and social practice. Recent selected projects and exhibitions include Huddle Tests solo show at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios; Facebook AIR Programme, Dublin; On that Note, Heart of Glass, Liverpool; Uillinn, Skibbereen, Moving Thresholds, National Gallery of Ireland; Verksmi?jan, Hjalteyri, Iceland; Cowper Care Home, Dublin; It’s All up in the Air, Norfolk and Norwich Arts Festival, Uk; and Bolthole, Open Studio, Tate Modern, Tate Britain and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. www.rhonabyrne.com
This year’s TULCA Festival entitled Seachange is curated by Mary Cremin. The festival will run until 29 November. Full details of the TULCA programme are available at www.tulcafestival.com
