Temple Bar Gallery + Studios announces the Recent Graduate Residency Artist 2024

We are pleased to welcome Christopher to the TBG+S creative community of artists, and look forward to supporting his practice as it develops.

Christopher McMullan’s practice is a multi-sensory communication of the materiality of situation, often encouraging physical interaction and recalibrating the senses. Exploring the materiality of aroma, he uses distillation as an archival exercise, initially intending to familiarise himself with Ireland and vying to make new smells into familiar ones. However feeling that this archive is meant to be shared, in an image-saturated world, McMullan uses this archive to find alternatives to the banality of codified images and regimented language. He thinks of the archive as an apparatus to serve as an arbiter between material and perceiver which acts to diffuse, to translate and to quantify.

Christopher McMullan is a Dublin-based artist from Texas (USA), and a graduate of Sculpture & Expanded Practice with Critical Cultures at NCAD (2023). Christopher’s graduate work Perfumer’s Organ was Highly Commended for the NCAD Staff Prize 2023, and was shortlisted for the RDS Visual Art Awards presented at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) (2023), winning the RDS Mason Hayes & Curran Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award. His work Muc chaor (2023) was specially commissioned by The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art for Unearthing Empire (2023). His work has been included in Irish Arts Review and he was listed in the Irish Times Magazine’s '50 People to Watch 2024'.

Christopher describes the impact of the award on his practice and his hopes for the residency going forward:

"The immediate benefit of the award is a bit of respite. In a city with over 3,200 vacant buildings, space is a rarity, and a secure space is a luxury. So with this award, I want to reconsider how my studio space can be used by working to create an active archive of curiosities, distillates, preserves, reductions, desiccations, extractions, and biochars, as a way of documenting memory of a space. The residency at TBG+S will give me the opportunity to broaden my techniques and technologies in my practice and to engage on a level I would have never thought possible when starting at NCAD. Even the physical location, with TBG+S being so accessible to the Botanic Gardens, DCC gardens, Dublin Mountains, Molyneux Stables, Phoenix Park, as well as the National Archive will make my practice of gleaning materials and knowledge that much more sustainable."

TBG+S Recent Graduate Residency Award is a professional development opportunity aimed at recent graduate artists in Ireland. In 2024, the award 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.

Image description: Christopher is walking across a sculpture in a bright white room. The sculpture consists of sixteen Versailles pattern parquet panels which are set atop grey canvas-covered hinged structures that move downwards if stepped upon, as demonstrated by the artist. Behind him, there are two tall and narrow windows with white blinds pulled down, blocking all outside light. In the back right corner is a crystal vessel containing ground coffee on a tall white plinth. In the back left corner, there is a minimalist white square seat.