Twelve artists awarded studios at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

Three Year Membership Studios have been awarded to Bassam Al-Sabah, Chloe Brenan, Alan Butler, Brian Fay, Niamh McCann, Liliane Puthod, Sonia Shiel, Eimear Walshe. Project Studios have been awarded to Lisa Freeman, Austin Hearne, Michelle Malone, Frank Sweeney.

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 are aimed at artists developing exciting emerging practices. The artists were awarded their studios by a selection panel including a current TBG+S Studio and Board member, and established curators based in Ireland and internationally, following an open submission application process. The artists will begin their studio tenure over the coming months. Each of the awarded artists share an acute connection to some element of the world that, as a whole, encompasses a wide range of vital concerns in contemporary life. Their exciting practices encourage expansive thinking that offers alternative ways of perceiving familiar subjects. We look forward to welcoming them all into the TBG+S community.

Bassam Al-Sabah deconstructs the parallels between juvenile fantasy and the reality of adulthood through visions of war, resistance and exile, in his vivid CGI animated films and sculptural works.

Chloe Brenan examines how the world’s patterns and murmurs are both apprehended and obscured using images, technology and language, through the simultaneous engagement of the mind and body.

Alan Butler explores the materiality and metaphysical experience of being in a technology-mediated reality by recontexualising material from contemporary simulation media.

Working through drawing, Brian Fay explores ideas of temporality, change and ephemerality in existing artworks to reflect our own complex experience of, and relationship to, time.

Using the methodology of a landscape artist, Niamh McCann balances the portrayal of 'the view' and its cultural context, with her artworks becoming layered repositories of their own disparate influences and idealisms.

Liliane Puthod’s use of industrial and handmade processes and materials confronts the strategies of commodification and merchandising in relation to the elusive construct of time.

Sonia Shiel plays with the expected conditions of an artwork by applying the self-conscious agency, and backstories of living things to create works that have near-sentient characteristics.

Eimear Walshe’s research through education, publishing, video, sculpture, and music throws light on the conflicts and contestations of fiscal, sexual and colonial economies.

Lisa Freeman’s multi-disciplinary performance practice employs intimacy as a form of resistance, revealing social anxieties along with difficult or forgotten histories of representation and precarity.

Austin Hearne’s satiric practice focusses on the presence of the Catholic Church in Irish culture from a queer perspective.

Through sculpture, image-making, oral accounts, audio, and text, Michelle Malone gives a material voice to working class histories in Dublin.

Frank Sweeney’s practice questions collective memory, experience and identity through film and sound, to suggest points of departure from dominant social, political and economic ideologies.

Each year, TBG+S provides excellent workspaces for over thirty artists to work in Dublin city centre. The artwork made in the studios is often exhibited throughout the world. As well as studio space, TBG+S offers the artists professional development opportunities such as studio visits from international visiting curators and artists. TBG+S is delighted to welcome all twelve artists and we look forward to supporting them to make ambitious new work in the years to come.