Temple Bar Gallery + Studios is pleased to announce the awarded artists from the open calls for Three Year Membership Studios and Project Studios.

Three Year Membership Studios have been awarded to Ella Bertilsson, John Conway, Vanessa Donoso Lopez, Marie Farrington, Austin Hearne, Nina McGowan, Manar Mervat Al Shouha, and Mandy O’Neill. Project Studios have been awarded to Lauren Conway, Ella de Burca, Blaine O’Donnell, and Venus Patel.

Three Year Membership Studios at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S) 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.

TBG+S looks forward to welcoming the incoming artists to the Studios and the community of artists.

TBG+S received a large number of high-quality applications for Studio Membership and would like to extend our gratitude to all artists who took time to submit to the open call.

Ella Bertilsson's practice explores visceral experiences that reflect life transitions, escapism and mental health through thoughts, emotions, memories, and the body. Audiences are invited to engage with installations and performances that incorporate dark humour, magical realism, and absurdity through staged realms. Moving between the personal and the universal, Bertilsson’s practice seeks to reimagine art historical tropes such as absurdism and dadaism to form a contemporary treatise on the human condition.

John Conway works extensively in the field of interdisciplinary and socially engaged practice, often in communities with shared complex or traumatic health experiences. His work is primarily developed through studio-centric artistic research, and is characterised by acute listening, sensitivity to context, and robust interrogation of material possibilities and artistic processes—reconciling pioneering collaborative contextual work with innovative and ambitious visual artworks.

Lauren Conway is a Dublin-based visual artist who uses archival materials, documentation from site visits, found images in her drawing, painting, and installation processes in order to explore experiences of education in Ireland. The work opens up a space for further connections to be made beyond the educational, exploring tensions between the empty school sites and the sensitive, exploratory writings, drawings, and worldviews of those that inhabit them.

Ella de Burca carefully combines performance, sculpture and painting to reflect on meaning-making and female histories, creating humorous and poetic experiences that often materialise as temporary immersive installation. Especially interested in how we perform as viewer and how this overlaps with ‘the male gaze,’ de Búrca researches, layers and recontextualises art historical moments to find reference in her lived experience.

Vanessa Donoso Lopez's work unfolds through an installation process that engages in a dialogue between cross-cultural identity, migration and the elements emerging from the inhabited space. She uses a variety of processes, including archaeological experimentation, collaborative clay sourcing, drawing, and conversations around repetitive object-making.

Marie Farrington’s practice reflects on the act of making through geological and archaeological lenses. Using casting, carving and other sculptural processes, she engages with memory through situated encounters with landscape and architecture. Her works make formal reference to field sampling, built heritage and histories of display.

Coming from a family of painters and decorators, Austin Hearne blends the stuff of the industry with photographic material to make intricate, ephemeral wallpapers, furniture pieces and mise-en-scène which serve as backdrops for performative and surreal narratives. His work reflects socio-political concerns around the Roman Catholic Church’s occupation of Ireland and more intimate narratives inspired by the artist’s homosexuality, working-class origins, identity, and family history.

Nina McGowan is a Dublin-born artist and professional freediver. Her work explores transcendence, and the primacy of the experiencing body. Earlier work investigated the idea of a ‘faith in the future’ by recontextualising landmark objects from science fiction films in architectural scale. Her current work reflect her experiences underwater, activating and engaging audiences in the liminal space of the beach.

Manar Mervat Al Shouha is a contemporary Syrian painter based in Dublin. Her practice includes figurative painting, where expressive line work are central to her approach creating dynamic compositions. Using mixed media including oil, acrylic, charcoal, her work explores human subjects in fluid, layered environments, where she blends bold colours with spontaneous, gestural lines to evoke a sense of vitality and movement.

Blaine O’Donnell is an artist working primarily in sculpture. Taking an experimental approach to the materials and debris of photography, architecture and geology, O’Donnell investigates the art object as a starting point for tracing networks of relationships between objects, humans and places.

Mandy O’Neill practice employs photography, installation, sound, text, and public dialogue, with the aim of creating affective environments and experiences for the viewer. She is widely concerned with structures of power and ideology and how they impact on everyday experience. The built environment is of particular interest with its material nature finding expression in the materiality of her expanded photography practice.

Venus Patel's practice is centred around her experience as a transfemme of colour, navigating the sociological role that conformity plays in a cis-heteronormative world. She utilises a unique blend of humour, absurdity and abjection to create multi-faceted work that is able to speak on timely subject matter such as hate crime, religious guilt and queer/POC bodily suppression. Her work incorporates film, performance and sculpture to create a world between fantasy and reality.