BBC ‘Good Morning Ulster’ radio interview for the !magine! Festival

Listen back to Louise Walsh discussing her work Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker (1992) with Sarah Brett and Chris Buckler on BBC Radio show ‘Good Morning Ulster’ . You can listen to the interview here at 01.23.13.

March 21st, 12 - 1.30pm 2024 at Europa Hotel, Belfast

Louise Walsh in conversation with Amanda Ferguson at the !magine! Festival

Iconic Irish sculptor Louise Walsh will share stories from her life and career, including her famous Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker on Great Victoria Street which sparked contoversy in Belfast City Council in 1989. The conversation with leading local journalist, Amanda Ferguson, will be followed by a group photo at the monument which attendees are welcome to join.

Born in Co Cork in 1963, Louise Walsh received her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Ulster in 1986. She lectured at the Limerick School of Art and Design (1988-1996) and the National College of Art and Design (1992-2022).

Amanda Ferguson from north Belfast has been a freelance journalist since 2010. She works as a Northern Ireland Editor and Ireland Stringer for a wide range of clients, including Reuters news agency and The Washington Post, as well as an event host, and broadcaster with various radio, TV and digital media outlets.She is also an NUJ member, and co-founder of Women in Media Belfast. You can find her online via Amanda.ie

Louise Walsh’s site-specific sculptural interventions interrogate ‘othered’ dynamics of embodied experience and desire. Her countercultural themes seek to puncture and transform constricted orthodoxies in queer, intersectional feminist and national identities. She playfully contests established forms and embedded lore to explore persisting joy, survival and rebellion.

Her installation projects include:

To Fruit (and Multiply), a site-specific sculpture commissioned for the Ballina Arts Centre, Mayo as part of I am what I am, celebrating queer artists who work with gender, sexuality, identity and queer politics (2021).

Hydra/In Law for Elliptical Affinities: Irish women and the Politics of the Body, 1984 to the present. Highlanes Gallery and Limerick City Gallery (2019-2020).

Outlaws Inlaws. As part of In a State an exhibition in Kilmanham Gaol on National Identity (1991).

Sounding the Depths, a collaborative video and photographic installation with Pauline Cummins, for the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin(1992), exhibited in the Tate Gallery Liverpool, Kunstlerhaus, Graz, Austria and Street Level Photographic Gallery, Glasgow, all in 1993. Exhibited as part of The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now, Protest and Conflict in IMMA Dublin 8 (2021-2011)

Walsh’s many commissioned artworks are located in public spaces, she negotiates these contexts through the participation of various constituencies or communities using dialogue, collaborative as well as educational practices. Her public art projects include; The Hybrid Loveseat, at Jame’s Hospital Luas stop, Dublin 8 (2004-2008). Circuit, at the entrance of the Royal Victoria Hospital (2000). An installation on a public walkway at Pier 4A, in T1, Heathrow Airport (1994). and Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker Belfast.

Find full information on the talk and the link for tickets here.

April 2023

Queer Seomra: Herstory of Art and Media’ for LINC’s Community Education Programme, based around Queer Art/Film/Media

 Louise Walsh was featured on Wednesday 26th April 2023

Linc is bringing a selection of voices and stories that are rooted in the Arts and Media, where a special guest speaks on their own practice and experience and discusses how their work connects to and impacts our community. This education program aims to develop a stronger sense of pride and knowledge in the art that is created by the LGBTQI+ Community.

November 2022

Pluck @ RHA x Louise Walsh

From Pride in Diversity to Standing Fast: Exhibiting Queer Culture in OutArt 1996-2001

Focusing on OutArt (1996-2001), this project explores the series of exhibitions that were organised by members of the LGBTQ+ community to build solidarity and explore queer practice. A series of video interviews screened in RHA’s Atrium and Online.

Although Irish LGBTQ+ practice has been examined in recent exhibitions such as I Am What I Am (Ballina Arts Centre, 2020), The Queeratorial (Pallas Projects, 2019) and Queer Embodiment, as part of The Narrow Gate of the Here and Now (IMMA, 2021), still its history in Ireland and Northern Ireland remain under-examined. Focusing on OutArt (1996-2001), this project explores the series of exhibitions that were organised by members of the LGBTQ+ community to build solidarity and explore queer practice. Featuring a wide range of work and approaches, OutArt showcased work by gay and lesbian artists at a crucial moment in LGBTQ+ history: in the Republic, homosexuality had only recently been decriminalised, and across the island of Ireland the gay rights movement was rapidly growing in influence and attitudes to sexuality were rapidly shifting. Working with the RHA, this program of talks, interviews and accompanying online publication will document the experience of those involved and will republish reproductions of little-known work to consider the legacies of OutArt. The program comprises conversations between Pluck Projects and artists involved in organising and contributing to OutArt Mick Wilson, Louise Walsh and Alan Phelan, as well as interviews conducted by artist Padraig Spillane with participating artists Prof. Catherine Harper, Andrew Kearney and Niall Sweeney.

Pluck Projects is a curatorial collaboration founded by art historians Sarah Kelleher and Rachel Warriner that champions innovative work and seeks to reassess the histories of contemporary Irish art.

Watch/ listen to Pluck Projects interview with Louise Walsh here

November 2020- January 2021 Highlanes Gallery

Outlaws / Inlaws as part of Elliptical Affinities: Irish Women Artists and the Politics of the Body, 1980s to the present, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda in 2020/21 and Limerick Gallery of Art.

Since the mid 1980s an important tendency in art by Irish women has been to situate itself clearly in relation to the significant changes in the politics of the body in Ireland that began to take place during that decade, culminating in the recent upsurge of both activism and artwork in relation to the Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment. The revitalisation of feminism during the 1980s in response to the repressive attitudes of church and state also resulted in the emergence of a new generation of Irish women artists whose work was explicitly focused around the politics of the Irish female body. An exhibition that explicitly focuses on tracking this ongoing conjunction of art and feminism in Ireland is long overdue, and in this sense Elliptical Affinities builds on and acknowledges precedents such as But Still Like Dust I’ll Rise curated by Vivienne Dick at Galway Arts Centre (2018) and the enmeshing of women’s history, temporality, embodiment and affect in Jesse Jones’ Tremble Tremble. Rather than a straightforward linear chronology Elliptical Affinities proposes something closer to the ‘elliptical traverse’ of Catherine de Zegher’s influential feminist exhibition Inside the Visible, exploring new genealogies of Irish women’s art indexed to the political. Central to this is the notion of femmage to investigate temporal relationships of affinity and influence across generations of women artists, as in Amanda Coogan’s performance Snails: after Alice Maher (2010) which will be restaged in its entirety at the opening at Highlanes Gallery. The exhibition will consist of loans from both public and private collections, and artist’s studios, including Pauline Cummins’s Inis t’Óirr, Alice Maher’s The Expulsion, Chant Down Greenham by Alanna O’Kelly, and Mr & Mrs. Holy Joe by Dorothy Cross; works remade especially for the exhibition like Louise Walsh Outlaws / Inlaws (first shown at In a State, Kilmainham Gaol, 1991), and more recent work by Breda Lynch, Sarah Browne and Rachel Fallon amongst others. Elliptical Affinities opens at Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda Saturday 16th November 2019 until 25th January 2020. There will be a closing Symposium in Drogheda on Friday 17th January at Droichead Arts Centre. 6Skin by Aideen Barry and Alice Maher will be screened during the exhibition in the Arc Cinema Drogheda. The exhibition is presented with Limerick City Gallery Of Art where it will tour to, opening on Thursday 6th February, continuing until 22nd March, 2020. Elliptical Affinities is curated by Dr Fionna Barber and Aoife Ruane.A full colour publication accompanies the exhibition with contributions from Gill Perry, Sarah Kelleher, Fionna Barber, and Ailbhe Smyth, and designed by Neil Gordon, 256Media.

The exhibition is produced by Aoife Ruane and Stephen Hodgins. The Exhibition is funded by Arts Council Ireland and Manchester Metropolitian University.

Find an interview with GCN here.

February 2018

Louise Walsh’s work Monument to the Unknown Women Worker (1992) was featured on the first episode of the BBC 4 Radio Documentary series Street Art. Street Art is a three-part series which looks at what happens when art breaks free from the gallery. With exclusive access to contemporary artists as they prepare in their studios, and install works across the UK, the three episodes, Place, People and Platform explore the big issues surrounding art outdoors. This episode explores how location influences a piece. The second looks at the occasionally unpredictable reality of what happens when a work goes before the people. The final episode "Platform" investigates a more contemporary way to consume art - we shop on it, bank on it, socialise on it - so how does the internet function as a new platform for public art? Presented by Dr Cadence Kinsey, Art Historian at The University of York.

The section relevant to Walsh’s work begins at 10.56 and you can listen to the programme here.