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2021 RDS Visual Art Awards Winners

Finn Nichol, RDS Taylor Art Award 2021 (€10,000)

Finn graduated from the Limerick School of Art & Design in 2021 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 unit 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, R.C. Lewis Crosby Award (value €5,000) & RDS Mason Hayes & Curran LLP Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award (value €6,000)

Vanessa Jones graduated from the National College of Art & Design in 2021 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, RDS Members’ Arts Fund Award 2021 (€5,000)

Karolina graduated from IADT Dún Laoghaire in 2021 with a first-class honour’s 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 2021 (value €7,500)

Lauren Conway graduated from IADT Dún Laoghaire in 2021 with a first-class honour’s 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 2021 she presented her first solo exhibition Karen at Ormond Art Studios. 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.

  • For further information:
    arts@rds.ie