RDS VISUAL ART AWARDS & EXHIBITION - 2021 WINNERS ANNOUNCED

Consisting of a curated exhibition opportunity and a prize fund of €32,500, the RDS Visual Art Awards exhibition is the only place to see the best graduates from all over Ireland in one space.

Winners of the annual RDS Visual Art Awards were announced last night in a glittering but smaller than planned in-person ceremony to reflect the recent Covid-19 advice on public gatherings. This year’s awards were presented by the RDS President, Professor Owen Lewis. The exhibition was officially launched by Catherine Martin TD, Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. The quality of this year's applications was outstanding, and the ten artists who were included in the exhibition went through a rigorous two stage selection and judging process. They are a real tribute to the professionalism and talent of the emerging artists coming into the professional visual arts sector this year.

The 170 RDS Visual Art Awards 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 53 graduates to move forward to the second stage of the competition which was later shortlisted to the ten artists who now exhibit their work

A judging panel of five visual art professionals reviewed these longlisted applications and shortlisted 25 candidates before selecting the final 10 artists for inclusion in the exhibition. This show is curated by Vera Klute and will take place in the RHA Gallery in Dublin until December 19. Vera Klute, Rachael Gilbourne, Clíodhna Shaffrey and Una Sealy are the members of the expert judging panel, which was chaired by RHA Director, Patrick T. Murphy.

‘It was an absolute pleasure to work with these ten talented visual art graduates, to bring this year’s RDS Visual Art Awards exhibition to fruition in the RHA. This show offers an incredible platform for emerging artists at what can be a difficult time when they have just left college. Exhibitors can win a share of the €30,000 prize fund. The show looks amazing and has a beautifully produced free exhibition catalogue to accompany it. I would really encourage people to come and see it before it closes on 19th December’. Vera Klute, Exhibition Curator

Geraldine Ruane, RDS Chief Executive said ‘The arts are a key component of the RDS Foundation Programme and its 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 continues a long-standing RDS tradition of supporting emerging Irish artistic talent. The prestigious RDS Taylor Art Award has been presented by the RDS since 1860 and is still one of the most important awards for emerging visual artists in Ireland today’.

THE 2021 PRIZES & WINNERS ARE….

RDS Taylor Art Award €10,000

The RDS Taylor Art Award is a cash prize of €10,000 and is awarded as first prize in the RDS Visual Art Awards to the person the judges believe to be the most promising emerging visual artist in that year. All visual art disciplines will be considered for this award, which comes with some rich history having been awarded since 1860. Some of Ireland’s most respected artists have won the award over the years including, Walter Osbourne, William Orpen, Mainie Jellett, Norah McGuinness, Séan Keating, Dorothy Cross and James Hanley.

And the 2021 winner is Finn Nichol

R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award €5,000

The R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award is a cash prize of €5,000. All visual art disciplines are considered for this prize which is the result of a bequest from Robin Lewis-Crosby, a former President of the RDS and Taylor Art Trustee for many years. The arts were always a key part of his life and he took a deep interest in the RDS Visual Art Awards. Before he died, he created a new award in his name for painting; a skill he wanted to encourage. When he died in 2008, he endowed a significant amount of money in his will to be managed by the RDS in order to ensure that the R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award would continue. In 2015 the Award which was formerly a painting prize, was opened to all visual art forms and increased to €5,000.

And the 2021 winner is Vanessa Jones

RDS Members' Art Fund Award €5,000

This cash award which is funded by RDS Members, is open to all visual art disciplines and all exhibiting artists will be automatically considered for this prize.

And the 2021 winner is Karolina Adamczak

RHA Graduate Studio Award €7,500 value

The winner of this award will have 24-hour, full-time access to a (non-residential) studio space (inclusive of utilities), for one year in the RHA, Ely Place, Dublin 2. The winner must be able to take up the studio during the allocated time frame and will have free access to all RHA School classes and master-classes for the duration of the year. This award has a non-cash equivalent value of €5,000 and comes with a cash stipend of €2,500 (sponsored by the RDS Members' Arts Fund). Applicants for this award must tick the box on the online application form to be considered for the Award. They must also state on the application how the studio award would assist them with their creative practice and include an outline of their plans for the year. The winner will be selected by the RHA School Principal in consultation with the RHA Director from those artists who applied for the award. The decision is based on the quality of the work as well as the written statement. On completion of the residency, the RDS will ask the successful recipient to complete a report on how the studio award assisted them with their practice.

And the 2021 winner is Lauren Conway

RDS Mason Hayes & Curran LLP Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award (value €6,000)

The winner will have full-time access to a room and studio space for three months (June, July, August of year following their year of exhibition in the RDS) in the Centre Culturel Irlandais in the heart of Paris. This award has a non-cash equivalent value of €5,000 and will include a stipend of €700 per month which will be paid to the winner by the CCI during the residency. For the first time in 2020, a cash award of €1,000 will be paid to the winner as part of the prize. Flights will also be organized by the CCI. Applicants for this award must tick the box on the RDS Visual Art Awards online application form to be considered for the Award. They must also state on the application form how the residency award would assist them with their creative practice and outline the focus of the residency. The judges will select the shortlist of candidates suitable for the award and the final decision will be made by the Director of the Irish Cultural Centre, Nora Hickey M’Sichili from those artists who applied for the award. This decision is based on the work presented to the competition as well as the written statement. An interview may also be required. On completion of the residency, the RDS will ask the successful resident to complete a report on how the residency award assisted them with their practice.

And the 2021 winner is Vanessa Jones

BACKGROUNDS ON THE 2021 WINNERS:

FINN NICHOL - RDS Taylor Art Award:

Finn graduated from the Limerick School of Art & Design this year with a first-class honours degree in Sculpture and Combined Media. His practice is a multi-disciplinary inquiry into storytelling and appraises the lived experience of the Anthropocene; an unofficial until of geological time used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.

The work in this exhibition is a clay and digital animation titled The Lonely Sea. This piece is a response to Covid-19 lockdown and its isolation. Devoid of interaction or connection, the characters on the screen live out choreographed loops of work and travel against the backdrop of an increasingly surreal world. Their fixed expressions betray only emotional catalepsy while the labour-intensive method used in the creation of the amination only serves to emphasizes repetition and labour. The music composition is influenced by luminaries such as Steve Reich and Laurie Anderson creating a psychedelic soundtrack to accompany the piece. 

VANESSA JONES - RDS Mason Hayes & Curran LLP Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award / R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award:

Vanessa Jones graduated from the National College of Art & Design this year with a first-class honours Master of Fine Art degree. She completed her undergraduate BA in Fine Art and Art History at George Washington University in the USA in 2003, where she received the Presidential Art Scholarship. She was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award in 2019 and 2021.

Vanessa is a figurative painter whose practice explores feminine themes using self-portraiture. Working representationally in oils using traditional techniques, she employs the history of Western painting alongside medieval and primordial symbolic associations to engage the viewer with the concepts of myth, beauty, replication and duality as they relate to the feminine archetype. Her personas inhabit familiar yet unknown landscapes that are embedded in cultural symbolism, and her self-portraits conflate Western and Eastern cultures to reflect her own Western identity integrated with a rich Eastern family heritage.

Her paintings have both a familiarity and a strangeness. She can shapeshift through time and space, and ultimately, see paradoxical ideas that exist within herself and the world at large.

KAROLINA ADAMCZAK

Karolina graduated from IADT Dún Laoghaire this year with a first-class honours degree in Art specialising in moving image, performance art and photography. Her practice is based around the mediums of performance art and film, with her work often crudely depicting human connection in a modern alienated society. Karolina has just started a year-long internship through the Erasmus + program where she will work as a filmmaker and photographer for dance company Siberia Danza in Barcelona.

I’m Selling Myself is a body of work comprising of nine short films and performances, four of which are included in this exhibition. They deal with emotional labour and the marketisation of felt experience. The work offers a topical social critique around the ethics of labour structures in the customer service industry and dramatizes the frustrations and hopes of the service worker. The work operates between the personal and the political where individuality and sense of self is sublimated into the needs of the service industry and its capitalist agenda to depict human (dis)connection in a modern, alienated society. The customer service industry constantly expects ‘service with a smile’. Employees must perform the role of someone at peace with the world while often being paid below the living wage. Such structures have led to increased feelings of detachment.

LAUREN CONWAY - RHA Graduate Studio Award:

Lauren Conway graduated from IADT Dún Laoghaire with a first-class honours degree in Art. She was awarded a DLR Emerging Artist Bursary, and the Dock IADT graduate award which includes an upcoming group exhibition at the Dock, Carrick-On-Shannon in January 2022. In October this year she presented her first solo exhibition Karen at Ormond Art Studios. She is due to undertake an internship in January 2022 at PUBLICS in Helsinki supported by Erasmus+. PUBLICS is a curatorial agency with a dedicated library, event space, and reading room in Helsinki, known for its industrial working-class histories and more recently, for its influx of divergent artistic and academic communities.

This body of work, entitled A Great Public Meeting, comprises of a series of drawings that explores empty educational spaces and questions aspirational promises put forward by the state through formal education. Using archival materials, documentation from site visits and found images from her teenage years, Lauren explores tensions between the empty school sites and the dense, awkward dancefloors of teenage discos. In one place, there is restriction and conformity, in the other, freedom and connectivity albeit the narrow version presented within popular media. The core question posed is how to be a teenager in these spaces and how to resolve the tensions and polarities between them.

The RDS has a proud history of supporting the arts and was central to the establishment of several of our national cultural institutions. The RDS Arts Programme today provides significant financial support, as well as performance, studio, residency and exhibition opportunities to artists starting out in their professional careers in the areas of visual art, craft and classical music.

 

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