2024 RDS Visual Art Awards Winners

Miss Mary Jane performing to a crowd of over 600 attendees in the RHA Gallery atrium.

Sorcha is a graduate of TU Dublin School of Creative Arts, Sherkin Island. She is a multi-disciplinary artist that works across mediums such as film, performance and sculpture. Sorcha’s practice explores the relationships between performativity, iconography and data collection. Sparked through her own sense of ambiguity around cookie collection, she began thinking about this storing and collecting of data as a kind of performative trace left throughout the online world. The “trace” in this instance as something that is feeding mechanised systems of extraction that rely upon a vast amount of inequalities, hierarchies and misleading aphorisms.

Sorcha’s installation Eden. mirrors the fixed perspective of representational painting to allow each character’s performance to play out simultaneously.  Rather than instructing the gaze of the viewer through the scene, each character captures attention through sound, gesture and physical expression – their “tastes,” each holding symbolic or cultural resonance that hold within them histories and presents of representation and power relations.

The 2024 RDS VAA judging panel commented on Sorcha’s practice saying; “Her work operates on so many levels. It is original, accomplished and very culturally nuanced – there are so many references in her work which also performative, fun and other worldly. Sorcha is a great asset to the Irish art scene."

Ava is graduated from TUS Limerick School of Art and Design in 2024. She is a visual artist working primarily in painting. Her work explores the human body, physicality within relationships and the self, and the interplay between the corporeal body and the concept of ‘home,’ capturing an overarching sense of intimacy through the work. She considers these concepts primarily through the use and lens of nakedness, intending to pictorially reveal the internal. Exposing private moments and delving into the detail of an experience. The pieces often work to describe the occasion when one thing or person interacts with another, at times examining an ‘after moment’ instead of the moment itself to encourage a sense of reflection. These queer intimate female-centric naked works aim to both work in and against the traditional nude genre and ideas of conventional viewership. Conveying identity and queerness, while questioning viewership, voyeurism and the male gaze.      

Commenting on Ava’s work, the 2024 RDS VAA judging panel said; “Ava produces a complete body of work that demonstrates an emotional intimacy. Her beautiful composition is a gorgeous tender study of a woman’s body by another woman. She is very assured and emotionally engaged in her practice which brings this body of work beyond just being so technically assured."

Keara is a 22 year-old visual media artist with Cerebral Palsy. She graduated from Ulster University’s Belfast School of Art in BA (Hons) Photography with Video, earning First Class Honours. She is of Filipino and Northern Irish descent, though she was born and raised in Canada.

Her work is influenced by her personal experiences; dealing with themes of identity, family, diaspora, migration and urban decay. Her most recent project, ‘Kapuluan’, is a ten minute poetic documentary film in which she speaks her father’s language of Tagalog to discuss the connection to her Filipino roots and to her father, though she has never spoken the language to that extent before. This unsettling cultural and familial blank in ‘Kapuluan’, is the main focus of the film.

The very nature of language - whether it be spoken, written, or seen through gestures - is such a vital piece of what it means to form connections with another. In her film, Keara questions human connections and the meanings of home, utilising elements of Gaston Bachelard's text, ‘The Poetics of Space’. As the original text was published in French, then translated and released in English, Keara plays with the idea that by translating it further into Tagalog, the initial meaning may have changed into something entirely different - a metamorphosis of the text.

Commenting on Keara’s work, the 2024 RDS VAA judging panel said; “Keara’s work is poignant and beautiful as it deals with issues of longing, belonging and identity. She deftly explores relationships, language and place in her work."

Waterford artist, Fionn graduated from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design in 2024. He works primarily with sculpture and uses video and sound to support this practice. His work considers our relationship with the landscape by addressing and reinterpreting references to Irish folklore and ancient Irish megalithic forms, such as stone circles. Working primarily with ancient bog oak - a material that would have been alive in the landscape during the construction of these ancient sites - his sculptures draw on the symbolism of the circle and the Sacred Oak Tree, often referred to in Irish mythology.

During the Spring equinox in 2024, Fionn brought his bog oak sculpture, Ciorcal na nDéise, back to its original homeland in county Waterford and installed it in the Comeragh mountains for five days and nights. The journey became a vital role in the story of the work. With his father Finbarr Timmins, Fionn carried the sculpture across the mountain to a site which would align with the sunrise. The artist stayed with his work for the entire duration attending to the atmospheric changes, and the sounds and smells of the landscape around him. This durational performance, and the film and sound work that resulted, aimed to foster a deeper sense of connection with landscape and with Ireland's ancient past.

Fionn’s research is informed by the writings of late Irish philosopher John Moriarty who drew his inspiration from the landscape, and the recent work of Irish writer and documentary maker Manchán Magan, who proposes mythology as an important knowledge formation, one that can offer a deeper insight into our environment.

Commenting on Fionn’s work, the 2024 RDS VAA judging panel said; “Fionn’s work is wonderfully ambitious in its mature materiality sensibility. It deals with concepts of time is a beautiful love letter to the Irish landscape."

Mary graduated with a BA Honours Degree in Fine Art Media from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, in 2024. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose work interrogates themes of race, identity, and spirituality, with a current emphasis on postcolonialism and its implications for the human condition in modern society. Mary considers spirituality a potent means for both socio-cultural resistance and the preservation of cultural identity. Her visual language embraces allegory through various mediums, including installation art, photography, sculpture, and painting.

Rooted in her Irish and Bahamian heritage—two post-colonial regions—Mary Madeleine's artistic practice is shaped by observation and critical analysis of how colonial legacies influence contemporary realities. Her multimedia performance-based installation, Lost and Giddy, deep impacts of colonialism and the ensuing loss of identity. She employs blackboards as pedagogical instruments to impart indigenous African and Caribbean philosophical and spiritual teachings, subverting their traditional institutional function by elevating deeply spiritual cultures historically dismissed as primitive. The installation integrates sculptural representations evoking African traditional sculpture, emphasising the historical appropriation of sacred objects within institutional settings, displaced from their original contexts. However, her sculptures portray Douens—figures drawn from Caribbean folklore—depicted with backwards feet and disjointed bodies. These lost and giddy figures epitomise the enduring spirit of loss inflicted by colonialism.