Ten artists awarded studios at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

Three Year Membership Studios have been awarded to Rachel Fallon, Léann Herlihy, Atsushi Kaga, Barbara Knežević, Frank Sweeney, and Luke van Gelderen. Project Studios have been awarded to Ella Bertilsson, Jialin Long, Marie Farrington, and Áine O’Hara.

Three Year Membership Studios at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios offer a long-term tenure to artists who have developed an established, professional practice. Project Studios offer a one-year tenure to artists who are developing exciting emerging practices and demonstrate talent and potential. The artists were awarded their studios by a selection panel following an open submission application process. The panel included current TBG+S Studio members and established curators based in Ireland and internationally. The selected artists are representative of the exceptionally high-quality and rigorous contemporary art practices in Ireland today. We look forward to welcoming them all into the TBG+S community.

Ella Bertilsson’s practice combines elements of sculpture, video, performance, drawing and sound to stage installations as a form of enquiry into bizarre and quotidian experiences and events that shape our character and define our identity.

Marie Farrington's practice traces overlaps between landscape and memory, exploring how matter is coded and transformed over time. She employs casting and other sculptural processes to construct material archives that capture residual aspects of sites. Her works allude to the studio as a geological site bound to gestures of accumulation, accrual, removal and erasure.

Rachel Fallon deals with themes of protection and defence in domestic and social realms, addressing topics such as motherhood and women’s relationships to society. Her work includes sculpture, drawing and performance and is rooted in the processes of making. She regularly collaborates with other artists and collectives.

Léann Herlihy [they/them] is an artist, researcher and educator based in Dublin. Their practice is informed by trans*, queer ecological, feminist and abolitionist theoretical frameworks which deploy alternative modalities of expression through an array of mediums including live performance, video, billboards, sculpture, text, workshops and radical pedagogies.

Jialin Long’s practice focuses on issues in contemporary culture, using new methods of presentation to explore socio-political and feminist issues. Using photography and, more recently, artificial intelligence she actively seeks ways to support and enhance the desired aesthetics and concepts of her intended message.

Atsushi Kaga creates an alternative universe, Kagaverse using a group of invented characters in the medium of painting. His work is influenced by the Japanese story-telling cultures of manga and anime, and lately the Rinpa School. He brings the Eastern aesthetic to the Western narrative through the complex search for personal identity.

Barbara Knežević is a visual artist based in Dublin. She makes sculpture, installation and moving image artworks that amplify the historical, material, semiotic and political functions of materials and objects. Recently, her practice has become attentive to how sculptures are instrumentalised by and affect the politics of ethnicity, and personal and national histories; historically and in contemporary contexts closely related to her own subjecthood as a person of diasporic Yugoslav, Polish and Australian identity.

Áine O’Hara is an artist, designer and disability advocate based in Ireland. Áine's work spans mediums and is interested in community building, accessibility and care. They are the Equity and Access officer for Praxis, the artists union of Ireland.

Frank Sweeney is an artist with a research-based practice, using found materials to approach questions of collective memory, experience and identity through film and sound. Recent work includes Few Can See (EVA International commission, premiering in competition at IFFR Rotterdam, Belfast Film Festival).

Luke van Gelderen’s interdisciplinary practice examines the performance and mediation of contemporary identities through technology. Converging celebrity culture, alienation, masculinity and violence, he creates immersive installations grounded in his own experience of recurring intrusive thoughts and images amplified by the internet.

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios received an unprecedented number of applications of exceptional quality and we would like to extend our gratitude to all the artists who took time to submit applications to the open call.

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios provides excellent workspaces for over thirty artists to work in Dublin city centre. The artwork made in the studios is often exhibited in galleries across Ireland and internationally. As well as studio space, TBG+S offers the artists professional development opportunities such as studio visits from international visiting curators and artists. We look forward to supporting them to make ambitious new work in the years to come.

Image description: A person stands on a bridge with arms raised, holding a red cloth apron covering upper body and face. The photo is cropped so only their upper body is in the frame. The apron has an image of an eye stitched at the top with the words 'Jelen Vagyok' underneath. The railings of the bridge are yellow in the evening sun. The sky is blue with dark clouds on the lower left hand side. A river and a city are visible but slightly out of focus in the background.