Gallery of Photography Ireland is delighted to announce the shortlist of nominees for our 2021 Graduate Development Awards.

With these Awards we want to identify and support emerging photographic talent in Ireland. The Awards will provide essential curatorial guidance and production resources for the most promising photography students as they embark on their careers as artists. The recipients will use the Awards as an opportunity to create new work with ongoing support from the gallery team.

To create our shortlist we invited tutors from photography degree courses across the island of Ireland to each nominate two graduating students. We were looking for students with a real passion for photography, who have been consistently engaged throughout their college career and who have already attained a very high standard in their practice.

The 2021 Graduate Development Awards Nominees:

Aoife Costello (LSAD)

Sorcha Flattery (Griffith College)

Leon Nevill Gallagher (IADT)

Thomas Hall (Griffith College)

Jordan Hearns (TU Dublin)

Sarah Louise Lordan (IADT)

Rachel McClure (Ulster University)

Adela Puterkova (Ulster University)

Grace Scully (TU Dublin)

Shane Vaughan (LSAD)

(Click on the names above to read more)

We are offering all of the nominees comprehensive mentorship, during which they will be guided through developing a new project proposal. Based on this, a maximum of three winners will be selected.

The winners will each receive ongoing mentoring and developmental resources to help them realise their project proposal, including a print portfolio of their finished work. This year the winners will also be able to avail of guest mentorship sessions with Agata Stoinska and Monika Chmielarz of D-Light Studios.

Gallery of Photography Ireland is delighted to support and encourage the growth of a new creative generation in Irish photography. We are offering these annual Awards at a time when graduates are still facing difficult, unprecedented circumstances. Our hope is that the Awards will empower the recipients in developing sustainable individual practices, making a significant contribution to the exciting future of photography in Ireland.

Aoife is a Photography, Film and Video graduate, currently based in Limerick City. While studying at Limerick School of Art and Design she became interested in performance art. During her time in college she discovered new concepts by undertaking workshops with artists such as Nigel Rolfe and Amanda Coogan.

Aoife’s work engages with the body as a site of lived realities from the past. Throughout Aoife’s artistic practice she is particularly influenced by the narratives of the memorable stories from the lives of women in her family. This unravelled emotions and own her experiences of growing up in the late ‘90s in Mungret, Limerick with a teenage mother. By using video performance, writing and sound she explores the many different ways that history can impact on the present.

Sorcha is an Irish photographer. In her project A Ballad of Home, she explores the relationship between people and home. In particular, this work considers the home Sorcha grew up in. In recent years, everything here feels much smaller, and familiar spaces no longer exhibit the same kind of home comforts from earlier years. Though her home is filled with happy memories, she has come to a point in her life where it has stopped growing and developing with her and it is now time to move on. Documenting this precious place now feels important, somewhat urgent. The desire to latch on to memories from the past is so strong, yet an impulse to move on, so intense. In this work, Sorcha asks what is important to remember - what is important to forget?

In his work, Leon is interested in people, their interactions and how societies 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.

Cloud based communication is no longer an acknowledged action, it is a passive and seamless interaction that has established a new instrument to experience. The virtual realm has unearthed a remote collective memory, emerging from a ‘latent’ or secondary form of experience. Daily thought drift between layers of temporal experience and being witness to the spectacle of ‘latent’ virtual experience. Perception is becoming the navigation of this spatiotemporal conflict.

Leon’s project Cargo acknowledges the compression of time in the virtual strati by utilising the scroll as a form to engage with the spread of time and visualise this erosion by means of layered imagery. Its black and white photographs express themselves as reference to an outside world. Yet, they are inherently fragments of psychological data that present no apparent coherence beyond a reflection on real time and space as it unfolds in conjunction with the present form of the cloud.

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).

Thomas Hall is a Dublin-based photographer. Adopting a documentarian style, he gravitates towards the idea of unravelling interior investigations and creating visual truths with a voyeuristic approach. He has always been more comfortable responding to his immediate environment, rather than ‘hunting’ for those moments.

 Using photography and experiences from everyday life with his relationship with his partner, Thomas’s project Dearest Father, what becomes of the boy, no longer a boy is a vehicle for him to explore ideas of internalised homophobia. These images attempt to articulate an internal struggle with the melancholic weight of introspection. The title is an excerpt taken from Ocean Vuong's poem Prayer For The Newly Damned. This poem seeks forgiveness from one of the main sources of every young man’s sense of masculinity, his father.

Thomas was shortlisted for The Student Media Awards in the Photographer of the Year category in 2021.

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.

We Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet (We Will Dance Again) is a mixed media artwork that explores the newfound realities of clubbers in Ireland and beyond, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Presented in a variety of mediums, the work explores the thoughts, feelings and lived experiences of clubbing and dance culture, the importance of these spaces for personal and communal growth, and the desire for post pandemic club life. 

The project has three different elements: We Will Dance Again, a 48-page A3 tabloid artist publication featuring six long-form interviews with seven people; Dancing (Removed), a series of four intimate moving image works where each participant was invited to dance in their bedrooms to a song of their choice while discussing what dancing means to them; and Raveyne, a 60-minute HD video/audio work. The piece features a 59-minute DJ mix, curated by the artist, as well as a series of verbal gestures taken from the audio recordings of interviews featured in the accompanying publication.

Sarah Louise Lordan is a Visual Artist who works predominantly with photography; exploiting the limits of image-making to create thought-provoking and conceptual artworks. As her interests and understanding of the world develop, so does her practice and visual rhetoric. For Lordan, art-making is a method of processing conflict within herself and the world around her. Using the written word to reinforce the intended emotions, Lordan invites the viewer to immerse themselves in the experience of her artworks. Using her artwork as a form of narrative, Lordan attempts to reveal the hidden truths found in the underbelly of psychosocial dynamics. Whether that be in relation to the notion of femininity, mental health, religion, or altered appearances; Lordan's intent when making new artworks is to inform the viewer of a lesser-known truth, refocusing their outlook to the subject matter discussed.

Lordan’s project Come As You Are explores the ways in which external entities have conditioned women to believe that they are not good enough as they are. Accompanied by written word and an installation piece, Come As You Are acts as an ode to women, encouraging them to accept all aspects that make up who they are as an individual. The project approaches self-acceptance from both sides of the narrative; from loving yourself to hating yourself, it is a constant self-punitive battle that has been captured through imagery and poetry. Come As You Are captures a cycle of thoughts and emotions that women go through when experiencing some sort of mental trigger, beginning with an act and ending with a resolution of indifference.

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.

Treating her photographic practice as a ritualistic meditation, 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.

Her project Reverence explores the burden of human existence: feeling the pull of spirituality that creates a relentless longing while being anchored in this mortal body. It creates a space for contemplation to encourage a still point in a world that is constantly in flux. Embedding the ethereal into material invites the viewer to open themselves to the suggestions and nuances of the work. It is a connection to something real.

Adela is a fine art and commercial photographer based in the Northern Ireland, specialising in portraiture. Her work revolves around themes relating to feminism and the representation of womanhood.

Her practice aims to challenge society’s representation of the ‘ideal’ woman and to disclaim ideas of women as dirty, messy or untouchable. With these self-portraits, Adela contradicts ascribed taboos and celebrates the experience of being female by examining denigrated aspects of femininity. Vocabulary of Touch generates a new language around the sensuality of her own plus-sized body and the beauty of flesh where the tactility of the intervention on the photographs invites the viewer to engage with the sensory experience of the body.

Grace Scully is a visual artist, whose practice focuses on social topics such as climate change, environmental issues, and the intersection between people and the natural environment. This series, Natura Imperium, looks at the history of botanical exploration and the impact this still has today. The research for this project ranged from the introduction of invasive plant species by wealthy landowners, to the monetising of land, and the inextricable connection between the history of botanical exploration and colonial exploitation. Some of the effects of this colonialist attitude have resulted in people becoming alienated from the natural environment around them and has setup the conditions to exacerbate climate change and ecological disasters.

Shane Vaughan is a multi-disciplinary experimental artist working in lens-based art and text. His work explores ideas of performance, selfhood, truth, and identity. Drawn to Dada, German Expressionist Film and Silent Cinema, his work is disquieting and surreal.

Living in Limerick over the last decade, he has worked as an artist, a teacher, freelance videographer and photographer, editor, and event organiser. As director of the poetry and arts event Stanzas he held over sixty events and ran several annual festivals (2015-2019). Through his freelance work, he has created numerous videos for artists and arts organisations locally and nationally, including Dance Limerick, Iseli Chiodi Dance Company, Tipperary Dance Platform, Limerick Youth Dance Company, Limerick Youth Theatre, Helium Arts, Fresh Film Festival, Opera Workshop, Irish Chamber Orchestra, RTE Orchestras, Scottish Recorder Orchestra and the Arts Council Ireland.

His photography and videography have been exhibited both nationally and internationally, most recently at K-Fest (2019), Noorderlicht Photo Festival (2020) and the Cork Indie Film Festival (2020). Through mise-en-scene his films explore the poetics of performance and silent film, as seen in ‘The Little Red Train’, ‘Mirrors & Images’, and ‘Church of Nine Eyes’. His short performance work, ‘This Mortal Flesh’ explores themes of Ageing and the Body, and his latest work ‘That Which Devours You’ is a montage tone poem. Performed in Ormston House, 2021, the work tackles themes of omens, spirituality, and abjection.

With thanks to Ann Curran (TU Dublin), Clare Gallagher (University of Ulster), Martin Healy (IADT), Sinead Murphy (Griffith College) and Lorraine Neeson (LSAD) for their assistance in creating the shortlist of nominees.

Banner image: Jordan Hearns, Midlands League (Hangar), 2021.

Exhibition dates

The award winners will be officially announced in the autumn.

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