Jools Gilson is Professor of Creative Practice in the School of Film, Music & Theatre at University College Cork. She is an artist whose practice is knotted, knitted and woven between the disciplines of visual art, creative writing, dance theatre and broadcast radio; choreographies with dancers spinning wool; 30,000 sewing needles hung from a gallery ceiling; radio about her Grandad and his chrysanthemums. Amongst other things she is interested in the grain and potentiality of textile practices to incisively re-think a contemporary poetics of femininity.

As a 2021 Fulbright Scholar, Jools will be hosted by the Department of Theatre and Dance at Colorado University Boulder. Her artistic research project Tempestries: Textiles, Tactility & the Climate Emergency is focused on the ways movement and textiles shape a sense of place within an Irish context. Interweaving textile art, choreography, environmental science and creative writing the project will focus on R&D for a fully realised work in Ireland in 2023. An exhibition of The Knitting Map (2005) at the Berman Museum of Art in Pennsylvania (Jun – Nov 2021) is a conceptual predecessor of this work, framed for 2021 as a tempestry (textile documenting weather patterns). Jools is delighted to have been awarded a Creative Residency at the B2 Center for Media, Arts, and Performance, part of the Atlas Institute as part of her Fulbright research. She’s also really looking forward to working with colleagues in the new Center for Creative Climate Communication and Behaviour Change (C3BC) and will be directing CU students in the short play Love Out Of The Ruins by Zoë Svendson for a Climate Cabaret as part of Climate Change Theatre Action 2021.