The winner of the 2024 RDS Taylor Art Award, given to the most promising emerging visual artist of the year in Ireland and worth €10,000, is Sorcha Browning.
The winner of the 2024 RDS Taylor Art Award, given to the most promising emerging visual artist of the year in Ireland and worth €10,000, is Sorcha Browning. She is a graduate of TU Dublin School of Creative Arts, Sherkin Island and is also the winner of the Graphic Studio Dublin Emerging Visiting Artist Award. The prestigious Taylor Art Award dates from 1860 and previous winners include Walter Osborne, Harry Clarke and Mainie Jellett.
The work of the shortlisted artists incorporates sculpture, drawing, painting, performance, digital and film. Many use their personal lives to focus on the impact of gender, sexual and ethnic identity. Several refer to the increasing effect of social media and the internet on the individual, highlighting the breakdown between public and private space.
Many use their personal lives to focus on the impact of gender, sexual and ethnic identity
Browning’s winning film installation with sculptural elements, Eden, refers in a dark and witty manner to the notion of internet cookies. These innocuously named text files are intended to enhance the browsing experience but identify the user: should we allow them or not? The work uses strong colours and geometric forms and is laid out in triptych form on an altar-like plinth in a darkened space. The female protagonists in the film are Browning in different guises, theatrically attired with blonde tresses or a retro dress covered with Warhol images of Marilyn Monroe. This enhances the notion of performance and self-consciousness that is so characteristic of the internet age. A second, smaller work, a screen installation, plays on the notion of voyeurism and on ideas of performative identity.
The inventive way in which Browning’s and several other works engage with the dominance of social media and the internet over our lives gives hope for a more critical stance towards technology in the art of the future.
The other award winners are: Keara Simonsen, Belfast College of Art; Ava Lowry, Limerick School of Art; Mary Madeleine McCarroll, National College of Art and Design; and Fionn Timmins, Crawford College of Art and Design.
Róisín Kennedy
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