Lorraine Tuck’s show for this year’s Arts Festival tells the story of a family living with autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability. Her two sons have ASD, with the younger boy having profound disabilities. But despite the challenges, theirs is a happy, acitve home as documentary photographer Lorraine captures in this exhibition. It also features her uncle, Owen, who has Down Syndrome. He is gay and gender fluid. JUDY MURPHY hears how Unusual Gestures came about.

When Lorraine Tuck was a photography-obsessed teenager she used to visit the Kenny Bookshop and Art Gallery on the city’s High Street, and admire the Galway Arts Festival posters.

She dreamed that someday she would show her own work at the festival and that dream has now come true for the Oughterard woman. Her exhibition, Unusual Gestures, at the Printworks Gallery on Market Street offers a unique insight into her family’s life.

Lorraine lives in Craughwell with her husband David McNamara, a farmer, and their four children. Their two boys, Seán and Manus have autism spectrum disorder while Manus also has serious intellectual disability and is almost totally non-verbal. He’ll be 10 in September and is attending Rosedale School in Renmore.

“Seán has ADHD but he’s grand,” she says of her older son, who is 14.

Maeve, their oldest child, is 15 while Sadhbh is nearly 13.

A warm, upbeat person, Lorraine specialises in documentary photography, telling visual stories of events and places that resonate with her.  Previous exhibitions include Children’s Burial Grounds/ Cillín, first shown in 2003, which is now in the collection of the University of Galway.

She also captured the landscape of the old Galway-Clifden railway line for a show at Galway City Museum in 2005. This was later published in book form as The Whistle Blowing. Images from a later collection, Plant, based on the plant life of Pine Island in Connemara’s Derryclare Lough featured  in the 2019 Clifden Arts Festival.

From childhood, Lorraine was drawn to document what she witnessed around her. In her teens, she thought of a career in journalism but felt it wasn’t possible, because of having dyslexia something that wasn’t as well catered for 30 years ago.

She also loved photography, as did her paternal grandfather, who had a home darkroom. He owned Tuck’s fishing shop and petrol station in Oughterard, she explains. Meanwhile, her mother’s family were farmers in Recess. Lorraine enjoyed the best of both words and even after her parents, Freddie and Teresa, separated, their relationship was amicable. Lorraine got a camera in her teens and also set up a darkroom, spending hours in a now-gone camera shop on Dominick Street where she bought the paper and chemicals to print her photos.

In 1997, as she was repeating her Leaving Cert, Freddie died, after which she drifted for a bit, working in shops in Galway and London. One day, Teresa told her it was time to get serious and suggested pursuing photography.

Lorraine did that. After a PLC course in the subject in Dublin’s Sallynoggin College, she went to the University of Wales’s Newport College graduating with a BA in documentary photography.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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