Temple Bar Gallery + Studios announces the Recent Graduate Residency Artist 2022

We look forward to working with Luke and supporting his practice within the creative community of artists and the administrative team working from TBG+S.

Luke van Gelderen’s transdisciplinary practice explores digital image cultures focusing on how contemporary identities are performed for and mediated by technology. His work encompasses the authorship of the ‘self’ online, and how the enclosed nature of networked relationships and environments drive compulsive self-obsession, reflexivity and consumption. The artist’s primary source of inspiration and material is his personal Google search archive which dates from his early teens to the present day, imbuing a seemingly autobiographical narrative while deliberately blurring the intersection between fact and fiction. Harvested archive images are interwoven with motifs of holes, slides, and spillways, suggesting the self-consuming loops of time spent online, the difficulty of accounting for that time, and the blurring of memory around it. The landscape of this space is loneliness, loss and violent queer representation.

Luke van Gelderen graduated from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art Design + Technology in 2020 as Student of The Year with a first-class honours BA in Fine Art. He was awarded the Ormond Art Studios Graduate Award (2020), shortlisted for the RDS Visual Art Awards (2020), and received an Arts Council Agility Award (2021). Luke is the co-founder of crux.project, an experimental nomadic curatorial platform. Solo exhibitions include: unrecognisable spillway, Ormond Gallery, Dublin (2020); My Activity, Rua Red, Dublin (2019) and Chatroullete, K4 Galleri, Oslo, Norway (2019).

Luke describes the impact of the award on his practice and his hopes for the residency going forward: "I’m thrilled to be awarded this residency. Having the security to spend a year working alongside professional artists within TBG+S feels like confirmation that I am moving in the right direction. It will provide space and opportunity to experiment, expand and solidify my practice. I hope to find a sense of community and engagement with the other artists, an opportunity for feedback, insight, and motivation. The supports provided will build my confidence and professionalism at a pivotal point in my career, hopefully securing my place as an emerging Irish artist."

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Recent Graduate Residency is a professional development opportunity aimed at recent graduate artists in Ireland. The Recent Graduate Residency 2022 offers a large free studio for one year, a €5,000 artist bursary, and a variety of institutional supports, to an artist who has graduated from an undergraduate degree in the past three years.