Photo Museum Ireland is delighted to announce that the Early Career Awards Winners for 2021-22:
Leon Nevill Gallagher (Institute of Art & Design, Dun Laoghaire)
Jordan Hearns (TU Dublin)
Rachel McClure (University of Ulster)
Begin in 2020 our Early Artist Awards programme supports artists in making new work in the crucial first year of their professional creative lives. The artists selected for the award were nominated by Belfast School of Art, Griffith College Dublin, Limerick School of Art, IADT and TU Dublin. The proposals we received from the graduates in this second year of the programme in 2021 were most impressive and are a testament to the incredible talent emerging from photography degree programmes on the island of Ireland.
The three winners demonstrated the creative potential and level of development we had been looking for. We are very pleased to be working with them over the coming months to help realise their projects.
The selected artists receive:
Mentorship and Curatorial support: Feedback and professional development resources for their new work from gallery curators, alongside guest mentors Agata Stoinska and Monika Chmielarz from D-Light Studios/ Blow Photo.
Production support: One-to-one sessions for image preparation and portfolio printing in our Artist’s Digital Studio, a darkroom masterclass in our fully serviced Darkroom.
Critical writing skills: A one-to-one workshop to assist the winners in writing about their work.
A deluxe portfolio set of prints with accompanying text and digital assets.
Photo Museum Ireland is delighted to help continue the growth of a new creative generation in Irish photography. Our hope is that these Awards will empower the recipients in developing sustainable individual practices, making a significant contribution to the future of photography in Ireland.
Guest mentors/ curators on our 2022 award: Agata Stoinska and Monika Chmielarz.
About the 2021 Winners
Leon Nevill Gallagher (Institute of Art & Design, Dun Laoghaire)
In his work, Leon is interested in people, their interactions and how society’s gravitational pull informs a wider sociological response. The act of ‘documentary’ is at the core of his work and the practice consists of three parts: it is born from lived experience, formal intervention, and experimental print techniques as a means to interrogate the increasing liminality of our presence. To date his work has been exhibited in The Copper house gallery, IE (2019), The Library Project group publication, IE (2020) and Noorderlicht photo festival, NL (2020 & 2021).
Jordan Hearns (TU Dublin)
Jordan Hearns is a socially engaged Irish artist. His practice explores the significance of spaces as vessels for individualism and expression, explored within the contexts of time, memory and ephemerality. His photographic works document transient street flowers, short-lived clubbing spaces and underground clubbing/queer communities. In his most recent work Jordan combines mixed media, moving image and audio curation, as well as a series of editioned artist’s publications.
Rachel McClure (University of Ulster)
Rachel McClure is a visual artist based in Northern Ireland. A Graduate of the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University, Rachel obtained her Bachelor (Hons) Degree in Photography with Video. Her work is driven by her curiosity about spirituality and her connection within the natural world. There is a drive in her practice to take the intangible and make it tactile, embedding the ethereal into material. Rachel follows her intuition and allows the medium to help her feel a deeper connection with the world within, and around her. This practice becomes a source of healing and understanding, image by image, a form of grounding.
With thanks to Ann Curran (TU Dublin), Martin Healy & Adrian Reilly (IADT), Clare Gallagher (University of Ulster), Sinead Murphy (Griffith College) and Lorraine Neeson (LSAD) for their assistance with nominations.
Sincere thanks also to our guest mentors/ curators Agata Stoinska and Monika Chmielarz.
Header image: Rachel McClure, from the series Reverence.
The Early Career Artist Awards are kindly supported by our Patron Programme.