RDS Visual Art Awards Past Winners

Alice Maher, VAA Curator, 2016

2022 RDS Visual Art Award Winners

Venus Patel, RDS Taylor Art Award 2021 (€10,000)

Venus Patel graduated from TU Dublin School of Creative Arts this year with a first-class honours degree in Fine Arts. Venus’s practice draws from her theatre and acting background, mixing performance and experimental film. Her work usually stems from her own experiences, rising from questions she has about the world, herself, and how the two interact. As a queer person of colour, she has constantly been othered by society and it is therefore important for her voice to be heard outside of the white heteronormative society she is so forcefully suppressed by. Venus’s work acts as a way for her to process her emotions, which manifest in a complex and dynamic way. The characters Venus creates are all extensions of her own psyche representing how she navigates the world. 

‘Eggshells’ is an experimental short film that deals with her experience of a hate-crime in which she was egged and yelled at. The film is cut into 12 different segments, each focusing on a different character performing with an egg in different contexts. As Venus tries to process the event, the egg becomes its own symbol as it shows her journey of emotions, from sadness to internalized/externalized anger to finally acceptance and growth. The film uses performance, music, and dance in order to tumble through this journey. Venus’s references to cinema and theatre create a different feel for each segment of the film. Although her work can be about serious subject matters, Venus still likes to bring in fun and light-heartedness. Darkness exists within the world, but Venus wants to show that there is hope and potential for change. 

Sadhbh Mowlds (R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award €5,000)

Sadhbh Mowlds graduated from Southern Illinois University Carbondale with a Masters in Fine Art, having previously completed a BA in Design in the National College of Art and Design in 2014. 

Sadhbh’s work straddles the line between hyper-realism and surrealism to create absurd yet recognisable realities that challenge prevalent and destructive social constructs. Sadhbh’s fixation on the human ability to contemplate is at the core of her pursuit, which challenges the absurdity of the beliefs, behaviours and perceptions of our species. As Sadhbh approaches these themes through the lens of her own frustration and vulnerability as a woman, she explores the phenomenon of consciousness and what it is to be self-aware. Using the body as an emissary, She probes the delicate boundary between our internal and external self, describing the impact societal perceptions of gender roles and value systems have on our suffering consciousness. This investigation culminates in bizarre, bodily sculptures that emphasise the restrictive bond we have with our flesh and the social situations that come along with it. 

Working in an array of materials, most notably glass and silicone, Sadhbh creates grotesquely beautiful and questionably life-like work that beg the viewer’s contemplation. In ‘Eve’, a full figure sits on the floor. In the process of shaving her toe, she is caught by the viewer who sees her reflection in the mirror she is perched in front of. Both of their reflections share a space in the mirror of shame and judgement. The work is a simple comment on the absurdity of our social perceptions of beauty standards and gender roles. 

Orla Comerford (RDS Members' Art Fund Award €5,000)

Orla Comerford graduated from the National College of Art & Design this year with a first-class honours Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Orla is a multidisciplinary visual artist working across the mediums of video, audio, photography and woodwork. The exploration of glitch art and the question of who gets to see in high resolution are central themes in her practice. Her deliberate distortion, degradation and corruption of videos and images in order to create impressions, plays into these themes. As a visually impaired artist, Orla’s aesthetic is informed by the fact that what she sees, and how she encounters the world, is a distortion in its own sense. So, while she often makes up an image of what’s in front of her, based on impression or audio, she plays with the idea of making the viewer do the same.Orla’s practice is inspired by a love of woodwork, which has been passed down through her family. Her work revolves around documenting her father’s woodworking and continues to evolve as she follows the process and progress of his projects. While this began as a subject matter for her work, it is now an integral part of her practice, as she employs woodwork as a medium to create large sculptural objects on which to project video. Doing this allows her to include both the materiality and the process of woodworking in her artwork.

‘Oidhreacht’ is an interactive installation that explores the question posed above — who gets to see in high resolution? It also chronicles the tradition and legacy of craftwork in Orla’s family. The documentation in this piece follows her fathers construction of a classic wooden boat. The large curved wooden structures on which the videos are projected, reflect the curves found on the boat. The viewer experiences this piece through sight, sound and movement. As the viewer moves through the space, they must rely on the audio to contextualise the piece. As they move forward the video sharpens and the reality emerges, which mirrors the reality of Orla’s interaction with the world around her.

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

Myfanwy Frost-Jones graduated from MTU Crawford College of Art & Design with a first-class honours degree in Fine Art, having previously studied Visual Art at TU Dublin, Sherkin Island. Working as an artist and oyster farmer based in the west of Ireland, she examines the complicated relationships between land, labour and ecology in a rural space. Embracing the sublime, her work investigates the dark histories of the past whilst acknowledging the picturesque allure of the rural landscape. Her work layers conflicting histories of colonialism and invasion with current issues of biodiversity and coastal erosion, combining photography and moving image installation with the use of text to create a poetic narrative.

Passionate about environmental sustainability, biodiversity and local food networks, Myfanwy makes work that looks at rural life and the changes inherent in the working landscape as we enter the Anthropocene. Personal stories merge with more universal themes, creating an immersive experience and linking the many pasts with the present within the landscape, giving insight into the realities and expectations of land and sustainability in the Irish rural environment.

‘Invasive Species’ is an immersive site-specific installation. It includes Invasion Stories, a self-published 50-page, linen-covered book, combining text and photography to investigate the stories of invasion, colonisation, land and labour discovered during lockdown explorations of her local Kerry countryside — a contested space, once a farmed property of the absent English landlord — now forgotten and overgrown, having not officially changed hands since Famine times. Modern day aquaculture is now a feature here as a small oyster farm is set up on the coastline and Pacific oysters grip the shore. The videos in this installation thread together the history, politics, ecology, bio-diversity and industry that have affected this site through the ages. Myfanwy uses footage from her DSLR camera, drone and iPhone camera in combination with text that floats meditatively across the images. Ambient sounds from the site join the sound of local children blowing into glass bottles from the shore.

Lucy Peters (RHA Graduate Studio Award €7,500 value)

Lucy Peters graduated from the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, this year with a Masters in Art and Research Collaboration. She completed her undergraduate BA in Fine Art at Limerick Institute of Technology. Lucy has a background in the fashion industry. She has become increasingly concerned with the vast volumes of mass-produced clothes that are casually consumed and thrown away. Her exploration of over consumption has encompassed research into the practices of fashion retailers, including those that are closing down, as well as the strategies that have been developed by charities to manage huge warehouses full of discarded, and ultimately worthless, fast fashion clothing. 

‘Making It Laaaast’ is informed by research into production and consumption practices, and the physical architecture of fashion retail display. It is a series of soft sculptures made from fast fashion garments. These garments are shredded down and woven to form large sculptural pieces. All material used in Lucy’s work is found, recycled or donated. A slow process is used when building this work. This deliberate action contrasts with the speed at which the garment was originally made. Material used to build the sculpture is grouped together by colour, oranges with oranges, pinks with pinks, greens with greens. When building the piece, the colour of the sculpture graduates into the next colour slowly. This references methods used in the fabric factories of Prato, Italy, when breaking down the garments ready to be recycled. 

The history of each garment is shown whenever possible by, for example, showing buttons, labels, holes, seams, loose threads, zips or any hidden mechanics a garment might hide. These elements reveal more about where the garment is from and the properties that make it. The support structures or retail fixtures and the bright colours reference vibrant visual tactics used by retailers to attract shoppers.

2021 RDS Visual Art Award 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.

2020 RDS Visual Art Award Winners

Jill Beardsworth, RDS Taylor Art Award 2020 (€10,000 cash prize)

IFTA-nominated filmmaker, Jill Beardsworth, was the 2020 RDS Taylor Art Award worth €10,000. 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. Her 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 stripped 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”

Dominique Crowley, RHA Graduate Studio Award 2020 (value €7,500)

The RHA Graduate Studio Award is awarded as part of the RDS Visual Art Awards and gives the winner access to a full-time studio space in the RHA for a period of one year with access to all classes and masterclasses in the RHA School. Valued at €5,000, this prize comes with a stipend of €2,500 which is supported by Whyte’s. Former medic, Dominique Crowley, was the 2020 winner. Dominique graduated from NCAD in 2020 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, RDS Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award 2020 supported by Mason Hayes & Curran (value €6,000)

Nadia Armstrong was the winner of the 2020 RDS Mason Hayes & Curran LLP 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. Following her BA, Nadia went on to study 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. Digital Native, is a video experience, that incorporates performance, narrative, green screen, 3D models and virtual spaces.

Michelle Malone, RDS Whyte’s Award 2020 (€5,000 cash prize)

Michelle Malone was the winner of the 2020 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. Following this, she studied for 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 Summer Project 1997 was 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.

Link to the audio piece which accompanies the installation https://www.michellemalone.net/listen

Maria Maarjberg, R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award 2020 (€5,000 cash prize)

Maria Maarbjerg was awarded the 2020 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 was a 10-minute video piece exploring the housing crisis and life under lockdown.

2019 RDS Visual Art Award Winners 

Louise Wallace, RDS Taylor Art Award 2019 (€10,000 cash prize) and Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award 2019 supported by Mason Hayes & Curran (value €5,000)

Louise Wallace graduated from the Limerick School of Art & Design with a degree in Photography and Lens Based Media. In 2019 she won ‘Best Short Film’ at the Szczecin European Film Festival for ‘Cosmic Joe’.

In this exhibition Louise presented an installation called ‘Hidden in Hazel’ which was made in collaboration with men living off the grid in the Burren, Co. Clare. Documenting these people’s lives and desire to live an ‘analogue’ existence is reflected in the processes used by Louise in making the work – using film photography, 16mm film, and cassette tape to record interviews. Louise has always had a strong interest in photography and documentaries and aims to make work of an intimate nature creating human connection.

The three film pieces were projected onto three screens on a free-standing triangular frame and accompanied by ambient sounds of the dawn chorus which were recorded in the Burren in 2018. The films explored hidden stories from three characters living amongst the hazel scrubs on the west coast of Ireland. Each protagonist had little or no connection to the digital realm, having instead chosen to focus their attention on their own personal creative endeavours. The stories were captured on 16mm analogue video which represented the lack of digital engagement experienced in their everyday lives

Clare Scott, Joint Winner R.C Lewis Crosby Award 2019 (€2,500)

CIT Crawford College of Art & Design graduate Clare Scott was awarded the R.C Lewis Crosby Award, which was split between her and Jamie Cross from IADT. Her work is primarily sculptural with roots in the processes of painting. Constructions are temporary, site-specific and made from recycled materials such as wood, cardboard, fabric and plastic.
The tension between the necessity for structure and the constriction it imposes is a theme in her work. Connected is the desire to embody the invisible boundaries we create to protect ourselves and how they impact our development. Humour is an essential element for her and related to this is the notion of failure as an integral part of the creative process. There is a desire to convey the pathos, absurdity and inventiveness that arises in the face of challenges encountered during the life of any entity. The work intends to disrupt and energise the art space, to delight and unsettle the audience who may recognise themselves in the processes that created it.

Jamie Cross, Joint Winner R.C Lewis Crosby Award 2019 (€2,500)

Jamie Cross graduated from IADT Dún Laoghaire with a first-class honour’s degree in Fine Art and will commence an MA in Art and Research Collaboration there in October 2019. He was a joint winner of the R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award along with Clare Scott.

The work in this exhibition entitled ‘The Uninhabitable Space of Objects’ is an exploration of the hidden space inside everyday items. The installation, comprising of several works, uses technology to reveal the interior of a material or object and make the inaccessible, accessible.

One of the works uses macro photography to explore the internal space of polystyrene packaging. The images are looped on a monitor, which in turn is encased in the original polystyrene the subject of the photography.

The installation represents the artist’s perception of spaces that are commonly unseen and unexplored. By turning the inner surface of an object/material outwards a new space has been activated and can be experienced by the audience.

Ronan Smyth, RDS Whyte’s Award 2019 (€5,000)

Ronan has an MFA in Fine Art from the University of Ulster, Belfast School of Art where he received the ‘2019 Deans List Award’ and is undertaking a PhD. His practice aims to facilitate the contemporary discussion of queer shame and its specific relationship with class. With an interest in how the material world acts as self-validation, Smyth draws upon his own working-class background to develop narratives that examine feelings of inferiority and uncertainty that often effect gay, working-class artists. Working across mediums including sculpture, drawing and fibre-based installations, he creates pieces that comment upon the complexities of status and the external struggle to identify oneself in the politicised codes of taste and gender in modern Irish culture.

‘Westwood Jazz No.27’ is a mixed media installation that involves the use of multiple craft techniques, including ceramic, textile and woodwork. Using ordinary materials and amateur methods of production, he creates work that consciously mimics the sophistication of cultured, fine art objects to expose the fragile histories and identities they represent.

Ellen Duffy, RHA Graduate Studio Award 2019 (value €7,500, including a €2,500 Stipend sponsored by Whyte’s)

Ellen Duffy graduated from TU Dublin School of Creative Arts with a first-class honour’s degree in Fine Art in 2019. Her practice is concerned with an interest in how materials give power to one another by way of the role they play in an assemblage.

The title of the work in this exhibition is ‘Assembling Agency’, it should be viewed as one whole work made up of many parts. The sculptural pieces are made up of a mix of found and fabricated objects such as: discarded rubber wire, steel grids, ratchet straps, corrugated Perspex, plaster casts and bubble-wrap. Some pieces comprise of wooden structures that act as a framework upon which these assemblages operate on and with. As an expanded composition, their corresponding colours and forms and their link to time and space attempt to create a non-narrative narrative. What they’re doing and where they are tells a story of what they are. They can disassemble and reassemble and exist in perpetually changing formats that can create infinite numbers of iterations.

2018 RDS Visual Art Award Winners

Mary Sullivan, RDS Taylor Art Award (€10,000)

Bere island native Mary Sullivan won the 2018 RDS Taylor Art Award for her BA work At Home, At War. Mary Sullivan is a graduate of the DIT Dublin School of Creative Arts, Sherkin Island, where she received a first-class honours BA in Visual Art. Her RDS Taylor Art Award winning installation was a video sculpture piece linking the repetitive nature of domestic chores to the drill and precision of military discipline.

Mary constructed a life-size military ‘look-out’ block house, which housed four video performances on four flat-screen televisions viewed through a peep hatch on each side. Mary recorded a series of performances in abandoned military sites on Bere Island, former home to a British navy base. Each task in the video works was undertaken with precision and care in an underground, windowless passageway. The scenes in the tunnel alluded to suffocation and claustrophobia, as well as speaking back to Ireland’s colonial past and raising questions of the role of women in Irish society.

Speaking about the winning work, exhibition curator Amanda Coogan said: “Mary Sullivan’s installation was a unanimous choice by the judging panel for the RDS Taylor Art Award. She is an artist of immense integrity and has created a powerful installation that speaks to Ireland’s colonial past and in parallel explores the role of women in Ireland".

Gary Reilly, R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award​ (€5,000)

NCAD graduate Gary Reilly was awarded the R.C. Lewis Crosby Award for Duanaire. This work involved the artist collaborating with a composer and a brass band. It incorporated a film and a beautifully crafted publication linked to the port in Drogheda, Co. Louth. Gary’s multimedia piece explores the relationship of the town and its port which has changed over the years as it moved from state to commercial semi-state ownership. In the past, Drogheda has had a strong working-class identity, but Gary suggests that the town has lost much of this identity in the post-industrial era.

Sue Dolan, RDS Special Award (€2,500)

A new cash award for 2018 was awarded to Sue Dolan – a graduate of CIT Crawford College of Art & Design in Cork. Her piece entitled a mala nada na lama, is in response to a case study of documented resistance to the displacement of a community in Rio de Janeiro, which happened in advance of the 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil, and it draws transcultural parallels with women’s rights in Ireland in 2018. Sue completed a six-month residency at the National Sculpture Factory and was awarded a Cork Film Centre residency. She won the Lavit Gallery Student of the Year Award, which gave her a solo exhibition in the gallery in February 2019.

Elaine Grainger, Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award supported by Mason Hayes & Curran (value €5,000)

The winner of the 2018 Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award in Paris was Elaine Grainger, an MA graduate of NCAD. This award is sponsored by Mason Hayes & Curran who have a strong track record of supporting Irish artists.

Her work entitled barely hardly there, is a site-specific installation. Each work is assembled with the intention of interrelating with the others, connected through the positioning of the viewer. Materials such as clay and glass are purposely placed with materials such a plastic and neon. The work hovers between two and three dimensions.

Anishta Chooramun, RHA Graduate Studio Award (value €7,500)

2018 saw another new award as the result of a partnership with the RHA who offered its RHA Graduate Studio Award as part of the 2018 RDS Visual Art Awards. With a value of €5,000, this prize came with a stipend of €2,500 which was supported by the RDS. IADT Graduate Anishta Chooramun was the recipient of this award which was selected by the RHA.

Entitled And Then We Met Anishta’s work comprises of a series of sculptures made from various materials including birch ply, paper, glass, fabric, metal, expandable foam and lino. The pieces vary in size and are installed to create an abstract jigsaw puzzle.