West Cork artist Sorcha Browning the pick of the bunch at RDS awards
Sorcha Browning, centre, at the RDS Visual Arts Awards with Glenn Loughran of BAVA Sherkin Island, Orla McDonagh of TU Dublin, and Jesse Jones, artist and BAVA Sherkin course coordinator. Picture: Emma Jervis
The RDS Visual Art Awards have been described more than once as the Irish equivalent of the Turner Prize, showcasing the work of emerging artists, and providing support at a crucial stage in their careers.
As it happens, however, the Irish initiative is more generous and has a greater reach; the Turner presents £25,000 to a single British artist, while the RDS Awards, with a value of more than €40,000, are presented in six categories, and the awards exhibition, currently showing at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, features the work of 10 shortlisted artists, all of them recent graduates from colleges around the country.
West Cork-based artist Sorcha Browning has the distinction of winning two of this year’s awards, including the RDS Taylor Art Award for Best Emerging Artist, for her installation, Eden.
Browning, from Ballydehob, graduated this year from TU Dublin’s BA in Visual Arts programme on Sherkin Island. Her work — in various media, including painting, print, performance, sculpture and film — has been praised by the judges for being “original, accomplished, fun and otherworldly".
“I’m interested in online data collection, and how it seems so cyclical,” says Browning. “But I was also looking at religious paintings, and especially at triptychs like Robert Campin’s Merode Altarpiece and Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, both of which have a kind of moral code threaded through them. These had a big influence on how I presented the Eden installation.”
Eden is a nine-minute looped film that finds Browning performing as different characters, often in surreal settings: “One character finds cookies in her clothes and in her hair. She throws them onto a cloud, where they are found by another character, who eats them. I shot a lot of different scenes and collaged them together, but they all sort of connect.”
Browning’s award for Best Emerging Artist includes €10,000 in cash, which will, she acknowledges, help her to focus on her practice. “I plan to stay on in Ballydehob, at least for the time being,” she says. “I’m already researching a new project, and making paintings to help me to work out my ideas.”
Browning’s second award is the RDS Graphic Studio Dublin Emerging Visual Artist Award, a two-week residency valued at €5,000. “I like the idea of being around other artists, watching them work and exchanging ideas with them. At the Graphic Studio, I’ll be printmaking with another artist, I’m really looking forward to that.”
Ava Lowry, who graduated this year from TUS Limerick School of Art and Design, won the RC Lewis-Crosby Award, a bequest from a former president of the RDS, with a cash prize of €5,000.
Lowry works primarily in painting, exploring the human body and the concept of ‘home.’ Much of her work features nudes, painted from a “queer, intimate female-centric” perspective, and questioning “viewership, voyeurism and the male gaze.”
“I started painting seriously when I was 18,” says Lowry. “I took a year off when I finished school, and considered other options, such as nursing or graphic design. But I realised that painting was what I really wanted to do. I love oils and watercolours, and the very act of painting on wood or canvas. Some of my influences are Jenny Saville and Lucien Freud — I love how they paint skin — along with an American artist named Amanda Ba, who paints these really massive female figures."
“I’ve been very lucky in having people around me who’ll pose for paintings. My former partner was a great model; I’d take photographs of her, or of the two of us together, and use them as subject matter.”
Lowry was delighted to win a cash prize so early in her career. “I plan on staying in Limerick, at least for the foreseeable future,” she says. “But I’m applying for residencies and exhibitions everywhere, and I’m not opposed to moving if the right opportunity comes along. I might do a Masters some time, but for now I want to take a few years to work and develop as an artist. The prize will help pay for studio space and materials.”
Fionn Timmins, a native of County Waterford who graduated from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork this year, won the RDS Mason Hayes & Curran LLP Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award. The prize, with a value of €8,000, allows him full-time access to a room and studio space for three months next summer at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, in the heart of Paris, along with paid flights and a €1,700 stipend.
Timmins works primarily with sculpture, video and sound, and is inspired by Irish mythology and folklore. His bog oak sculpture, Ciorcal na nDelise, has had an interesting history.
“I grew up in West Waterford, in a place called Clú na Snear,” he says. “My father works in wood. He introduced me to bog oak, showing me how it can be polished up and so on. For the Ciorcal na nDelise sculpture, I collected some oak at home, and brought it to Cork to work on at college. Then I brought it back to Clú na Snear, and myself and my father brought it up to the Comeragh mountains. We had the van for most of the way, but we had to carry the oak the last 300 or 400 yards ourselves. That was fairly crippling."
“I built the sculpture in a circle, and aligned it with the Spring equinox, in line with the sunrise, and left it there for five days and nights. I was with it most of the time, recording audio and video. My sister helped with that, and my friend Noah Snyder, who’s at the School of Music, helped with editing the sound. After that, I brought the sculpture back to Cork and reassembled it for my degree show at the Crawford.”
Timmins intends making good use of his time in Paris. “I’ll continue researching Irish mythology, and I’ll have the use of a studio, so I hope to produce work while I’m there,” he says. “I’m based in Cork at the moment. I have a studio space at the National Sculpture Factory, and I’m working on similar projects with bog oak.”
The two other prize winners this year are Keara Simonsen, a graduate of Ulster University’s Belfast School of Art, who won the RDS Members’ Art Fund Award, with a value of €5,000, for her 10-minute film project, Kapuluan; and Mary Madeleine McCarroll, a graduate of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, who won the RHA Graduate Studio Award, with a value of €7,500, for her multi-media performance-based installation, Lost and Giddy.
All the award winners’ work, along with that of the other shortlisted artists — Cahal O’Connell/Miss Mary Jane, Claire Ritchie, Heather Hughes, Kyle Fairbanks and Stell de Burca — can be seen at the 2024 RDS Visual Art Awards Exhibition, running at the RHA Gallery Dublin until January 18, 2025.
- Further information: rhagallery.ie
