IFTA-nominated filmmaker, Jill Beardsworth, was announced today (16.12.20) as this year’s winner of the RDS Taylor Art Award worth €10,000. For the first time, all five prizes at the RDS Visual Art Awards, the largest visual art prize fund in Ireland at over €30,000, were awarded to female graduates.
Jill’s winning work, ‘About Being’, which she completed while at GMIT, was created in collaboration with ‘That’s Life’, an award-winning arts and personal development programme for people with intellectual disabilities run by the Brothers of Charity in Galway city.
As one half of Twopair films, Jill already has plenty of experience of working behind the camera. Twopair are the IFTA-nominated makers of Apples of the Golan and the 2020 release When All Else is Ruin, as well as the recent documentary aired on RTE One in November on Bloody Sunday. So, no surprise that she specialised in film when returning to college to do an MA.
Her award-winning work explores the individual identities of a group of adults with intellectual disability. Seven participants collaborated on exploring their own identities and were invited to sit in front of a film camera, to ‘be’ themselves without direction or intervention. One short film was created per participant to reflect an aspect of their personality, life experience, talent and aspiration and reflect something of their inner essence. The result is a moving and humanising insight to the lives of people often on the margin of society.
Speaking about the winning work, Chair of the judging panel, Patrick T. Murphy, Director of the RHA, said: “Jill Beardsworth creates compelling and profound portraits of our fellow citizens who grapple with everyday challenges. Her short films are striped of any distraction and engage both the seater and the viewer in a space of intimate encounter. It is a remarkable and exquisitely achieved body of work”
As a winner of the RDS Taylor Art Award which has been awarded by the RDS since 1860, Jill follows an illustrious rollcall of previous winners such as Roderic O’Connor, Seán Keating, Louis Le Brocquy, Dorothy Cross, Maria McKinney, Norah McGuinness and many others.
The RDS Visual Art Awards is the most important platform for visual art graduates in Ireland. It provides vital supports and exposure for emerging artists as they move into early professional practice. Normally consisting of two parts; a competition and a curated exhibition opportunity, this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the RDS was unable to proceed with the exhibition aspect of the project. That made it even more important to deliver the competition opportunity which offers a significant prize fund of over €30,000 to emerging Irish artists.
The RHA Graduate Studio Award is awarded as part of the RDS Visual Art Awards. With a value of €5,000, this prize comes with a stipend of €2,500 which is supported by Whyte’s. Former medic, Dominique Crowley, is the 2020 winner having returned to college. Dominique graduated from NCAD this year with an MFA in Art in the Contemporary World. Dominique is a painter working in a style that she refers to as disrupted realism. Her paintings are figurative, tending in parts towards photo-realism. This is augmented by the application of a resin treatment to the surface which obliterates the brushstrokes creating a smoothness and heightened saturation creating a sort of ‘screen vision’ which transforms the works into digitized objects. She incorporates symbols of digital technology in her work, critiquing the pervasive presence of the screen in our everyday lives.
Nadia Armstrong is the winner of the RDS Mason Hayes & Curran Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award (value €6,000). Nadia graduated from NCAD this year with a BA in Fine Art with Critical Cultures (International). She was awarded the Fire Station Artists’ Studios 2020 Graduate Award & Residency for Digital Media, a Digital Society Bursary Award and the Goethe Institute’s AI-Residency Award. She is currently studying on the MFA Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD. Nadia’s work has a strong contemporary relevance. She works at the intersection between the analogue and the digital world, interrogating the systems and networks of control within which modern humans finds themselves. She is concerned with how we use technology and the ways in which it uses us. Her final year work, Digital Native, is a video experience, that incorporates performance, narrative, green screen, 3D models and virtual spaces.
Maria Maarbjerg was awarded the R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award (€5,000 cash prize). Maria graduated from TU Dublin School of Creative Arts with a BA Fine Art degree where she was awarded the Best Studentship Award. Working primarily with photography and performance, her practice revolves around questions of national identity informed by her Scandinavian cultural heritage. Her style favours a nostalgic expression, and is concerned with shapes, lines and textures. Her photos are all shot on film and deliberately contain imperfections such as blurring, grains and dust, which gives her works an archival and retrospective style. Maria was awarded a Digital Media Award at the Fire Station Artists’ Studios where she has just begun her residency. Her end of year work entitled Belonging without Belonging is a 10-minute video piece exploring the housing crisis and life under lockdown.
Michelle Malone is the winner RDS Whyte’s Award (€5,000 cash prize). Michelle graduated from TU Dublin School of Creative Arts with a first-class honour’s BA degree in Fine Art. She is currently undertaking an MA there and has won several awards including the Fire Station Artist Studio Development Award, the John Creagh Student of Excellence Award as well as awards for achieving the highest studio grade and most original thesis. Michelle’s practice is informed by her experience of growing up in a working-class area in Dublin’s inner city. Through sculpture, installation, audio and photography she investigates issues about class, taste, belonging, identity and community. Her final year work is a scene setting installation accompanied by an audio piece that tell the story of a memory of a trip to Clara Lara Fun Park in Wicklow.
This year only, all final year graduating artists from BA and MA visual art-based courses were eligible to apply through an open competition. Their applications were reviewed by a team of six professional curators: Sheena Barrett, Valerie Byrne, Mary Cremin, Seán Kissane, Paul McAree and Sharon Murphy. Between them, they longlisted 48 graduates to move forward to the second stage of the competition.
A judging panel of five visual art professionals reviewed these longlisted applications and shortlisted 22 candidates who were seriously considered for one of the five prizes when the panel met as a group in early December. Vera Klute, Rachael Gilbourne, Clíodhna Shaffrey and Una Sealy were the members of the expert judging panel, which was chaired by RHA Director, Patrick T. Murphy.
Why the RDS?
The arts are a key component of the RDS mission to contribute to the cultural and economic development of Ireland. The RDS Visual Art Awards has a total prize fund equivalent of €32,500 and follows the long-standing RDS tradition of supporting emerging Irish artistic talent.
