Tempestries by Jools Gilson

Tempestries is focussed on the ways movement and textiles shape a sense of place within an Irish context. Its spliced science and speculative history are anchored in the  story of  a 7th Century bog skeleton and her textiles found on Cloonshannagh Bog in Co. Roscommon in 2005. As part of this project Jools is collaborating with the Wireless Sensor Networks Research Group at Tyndall to develop lively clothing haunted by history and the climate crisis. This choreographic research asks how dance might entwine with smart textiles (textiles with integrated technologies) to ask provocative dancing questions in our time of climate emergency. With the Irish peatland bog as theme and metaphor, Tempestries evokes the story of a woman lost in the bog in the 7th century, and discovered in 2005 during mechanical peat digging. She is found with her clothes preserved, and I use this science to embody glimpses into her life and what her story tells us about femininity, ecology, power and the warming of the world. Tempestries is a play on the words tempest, tapestry and temperature - threads woven together to make connections between the female labour of textile making, the moving female body and our relationship to landscape.

This is also the mosses’ story: In their slow and patient way, the mosses wait their time and come to make the bog itself – slow, dark as hunger, thick with memory. Tempestries makes dancing connections between the moss that makes peat bogs and the historic / current mining of peatland for fuel and female identity; somatic sensing, gestural layering, environmental improvisation and play with materials. 

Tempestries is being developed in collaboration with dance artists Justine Cooper and Siobhán Ní Dhuinnin, ecologist / textile artist Veronica Santorum and sound artist Ben Burns as well as engineers from the Tyndall Institute. 

Join Jools Gilson as she shares her work on Friday 25 August at 6pm, email boxoffice@firkincrane.ie to reserve your place. Justine Cooper will teach our weekly professional class on Thursday 24 August at 11am.

Jools Gilson has been making work for dance/theatre venues, galleries and broadcast radio for thirty years. Recent projects include The Vintage - Ceist Residencies at Dance Cork in 2022 & 2023 with mentorship from Bebe Miller and text / performance for Mary Wycherley’s Weathering (Dance Limerick 2023). Initial R&D for Tempestries took place in Fall 2021 at the University of Colorado supported by a Fulbright Award. Jools is Professor of Creative Practice at UCC.

Director: Jools Gilson
Ecologist & Textile Artist: Veronica Santorum
Sound Artist: Benjamin Burns
Dance artists: Justine Cooper, Siobhán Ní Dhuinnin
Tyndall: Brendan O’Flynn, Head of group for the Wireless Sensor Networks Research Group, Salvatore Tedesco. Wearable Technology Lab / Wireless Sensor Networks Research Group

Funded by the Arts Council’s Dance Bursary. Supported by Future Humanities Institute and Tyndall Institute.