Winner of the €10,000 RDS Taylor Art Award, Venus Patel. Photo Shane O’Neill
‘What you’re seeing is a cutting-edge snapshot of the future of Irish art,’ says artist Aideen Barry, curator of this year’s RDS Visual Arts Awards. Barry’s own work incorporates drawing, sculpture and film, and the show that she and her fellow judges assembled provides a rich and entertaining blend of these media.
Winner of the R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award, Sadhbh Mowlds’ entry in the foyer is a startlingly lifelike Eve, which sets the tone for a show full of colour and technical verve. Orla Comerford’s Oidhreacht is an innovative video showing her father, a woodworker, building a boat. The film is projected onto three large, curved screens, with the images moving from abstract to figurative, depending on how far you stand from the screen. This provides the viewer with a taste of Comerford’s own visual impairment. It is a technical tour de force, an aesthetically pleasing encounter and a meaningful expression of the artist’s psyche. Another arresting piece of video was Aisling Phelan’s Dual Reality, with its meditation on our digital identities.
The longlist of candidates for the awards, and indeed the awards themselves, were inclusive in terms of ethnicity and LGBGTQ+ representation
The longlist of candidates for the awards, and indeed the awards themselves, were inclusive in terms of ethnicity and LGBGTQ+ representation. However, there was a noticeable shortage of male contenders on both lists, with only one man making it to the final thirteen: Szymon Minias’ small self-portraits in oil were full of character, with echoes of Édouard Vuillard and Eugène Leroy.
Michelle Malone’s striking tapestries of Artane Industrial School, accompanied by video and interviews with those whose lives were touched by the abuse there and in places like it, was another moving work.
The main award, the RDS Taylor Art Award, went to Venus Patel for her film Eggshells, a darkly humorous take on her experiences as a queer person. Myfanwy Frost-Jones’ alarming film deals with pollution in Kenmare Bay, combining grim facts with distractingly gorgeous views of the south-west.
It is a shame the exhibition did not enjoy a longer run as, notwithstanding the serious issues it addressed, it was highly engaging and professionally presented.
John P O’Sullivan
