Winners of New Trinity Creative Awards Scheme Announced
Posted on: 24 August 2015
Established and rising stars of the Irish creative arts were today announced as the winners of the Trinity Creative Challenge, a new arts awards scheme which aims to foster the development of innovative interdisciplinary art projects with Trinity College Dublin.
Five proposals were selected from over 140 applicants to share the award fund of €40,000, which seeks to catalyse the creative and cultural arts in Dublin city and support the development of the creative and cultural industries sector. All five winning applicants will present new works in Trinity in April 2016.
Trinity Creative Challenge Award Recipients:
- Pan Pan – An immersive theatre performance featuring binaural technology to be developed with Trinity.
- Enda Bates – ‘Trinity 360’: a new composition of spatial music to be performed in Front Square.
- Grace Weir – ‘A Reflection on Light’: a film piece telling the history of a painting, Let there be Light by Mainie Jellett, which hangs in the School of Physics in Trinity.
- Declan Clarke – ‘Casement in Kristiania’: a film project exploring the social and political heritage of contemporary Ireland through the lens of Trinity.
- Fiona Hallinan & Kate Strain – ‘Department of Ultimology’: an art research project exploring the evolution and disappearance of forms of knowledge within academic disciplines.
Trinity Creative Challenge which was announced in May, is open to projects and ideas with a focus on interdisciplinary creative arts practices across a wide range of forms. They include performance, visual art, music, film, design, new media, animation, gaming and creative technologies, involving a collaboration with Trinity College . This is the first time that Trinity has sponsored a funding award to foster creative interdisciplinary projects and works.
Trinity Provost, Dr Patrick Prendergast commented: “We were overwhelmed with the response to the Trinity Creative Challenge. With so many strong entries, the judging panel had its work cut out to reduce it to just five awardees. The selected projects exemplify what the Challenge was all about – linking creative arts and technology in a way that will catalyse new initiatives and ventures and use the Trinity campus and collections in exciting and original ways. Trinity is committed to creating the conditions for developing and supporting creative talent and we look forward to working with the winning entrants on the realisation of their projects over the coming months.”
Director of The Lir, Ireland’s National Academy of Dramatic Art Loughlin Deegan and member of the judging panel added: “It is very exciting that Trinity is developing this initiative to support creative talent and I was delighted to be part of the selection panel. I was very impressed with the overall strength of the applications, nevertheless the selected proposals stood out in how they creatively responded to the Trinity Creative Challenge and for the originality and potential of their ideas. It will be fascinating to see these projects realised next year.”
Other members of the judging panel were Trinity Creative Curator, Brian Cass; Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Sarah Glennie and composer and music producer, Benedict Schlepper-Connolly.
Note to Editors:
Further information on winning proposals:
Enda Bates’s TRINITY 360 will be a newly commissioned composition of spatial music for multiple loudspeakers and performers, including many performing groups associated with Trinity, to be presented as a large-scale live event in the Front Square of Trinity. As well as the immersive live performance, this performance will be filmed and recorded to create a 360 virtual reality presentation and surround sound recording of the event.
Enda Bates is a composer, musician, producer and academic at Trinity College Dublin where he lectures on the Music & Media Technologies Programme. His music has been performed by, among others, the Crash Ensemble, the RTÉ; National Symphony Orchestra, Kate Ellis, Chamber Choir Ireland, Anne La Berge, Concorde, Trio Scordatura, Ensemble Mise-en, the Doelen Quartet, and New Dublin Voices. He has received various commissions and awards including the 37th Florilege Vocal de Tours, the 2008 Irish National Choir of the Year competition, the 2009 Gaudeamus Music Prize shortlist and the 2010 Música Viva Competition. He is a founder member of the Spatial Music Collective and an active performer, both of his own work and with other performers and groups such as the Spook of the Thirteenth Lock
Declan Clarke’s Casement in Kristiania (working title) will be a new film work commissioned by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Belfast Exposed, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, and Trinity Creative. Taking a series of historical vignettes from the last 100 years since the 1916 Rising as its starting point, the film intends to examine the social and political heritage of contemporary Ireland, weaving through this a history of Trinity College Dublin and what it represented historically and politically during this time. The film will be shot in a number of locations, including Trinity College, and will involve a meaningful research process with different departments within Trinity. The film will premiere at Trinity College Dublin in April 2016 in a space connected to scenes in the film, along with a public talk between the artist and members of the Trinity community he will be collaborating with over the course of the films development. Two major public exhibitions of this work will subsequently take place at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in April 2016 and at Belfast Exposed in June/July 2016.
Declan Clarke is an Irish artist, now based in Berlin. Over 15 years, he has developed an impressive oeuvre of film work focussing on themes of modernity, conflict and the human stories behind major upheavals in 20th century history. He is particularly interested in post revolution societies and uses a personal viewpoint to tell complex historical narratives. His work has been shown at Tate Britain, Home Manchester, and Serpentine Gallery London, among many other places. He has been awarded residencies at MoMA/PS1, Saatchi Fellowship and IMMA. Three newly commissioned film works are currently on show in a major solo exhibition at Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane.
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S) is Dublin's most prominent artists community, founded in 1983. It accommodates thirty subsidised artists’ studios in which a membership of professional visual artists make their work. In the gallery, a programme of five exhibitions each year represent a cross section of contemporary Irish and international visual arts practice.
Belfast Exposed Photography is Northern Ireland’s principal gallery of contemporary photography and lenses based work, commissioning, publishing and showing work by local and international photographers.
Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, profiles Irelands rich arts scene and is at the heart of Franco-Irish cultural collaboration.
Fiona Hallinan & Kate Strain’s Department of Ultimology. Hallinan and Strain propose to establish the first Department of Ultimology at Trinity College Dublin. Ultimology is the study of the dead or dying, to investigate that which is conclusive in a series or process. Through embedded research across the University they propose to identify endangered or obsolete elements in particular departments, as a way to research the evolution and disappearance of forms of knowledge within academic disciplines and the University.
Fiona Hallinan and Kate Strain are based in Dublin and are graduates of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin. Hallinan is the creator of a number of collaborative projects such as Heterodyne, iterations of which have taken place in Paris, Istanbul, and Wicklow; The Hare, an artist run temporary café at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin; Concrete Tiki, a series of site-specific food events at the Irish Museum of Modern Art; and HOMESTAY, hospitality project for Science Gallery, Dublin. Her work has been shown at Kerlin Gallery, IMMA, Mother's Tankstation and Brown University. Strain is researching performativity in visual arts practice. Curatorial projects include On Curating Histories, generative lecture series (2015); The Man Who Sat On Himself, group exhibition at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino (2015); The Centre For Dying On Stage #2, public lecture for ‘Performance as Process’ Residency at Delfina Foundation, London, (2015); and Father, Can’t You See I’m Burning? group exhibition, at de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam (2014). Strain also makes up one half of the paired curatorial practice RGKSKSRG.
Pan Pan Theatre Company will develop and present a unique immersive theatre performance/installation. A significant aspect of this production will be the use of binaural technology which they propose to develop with Trinity College Dublin.
Pan Pan is the longest-established contemporary theatre company in Ireland, funded in 1991 by co-artistic directors Aedín Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn after they both graduated from Trinity College. Throughout their career they have created 28 theatre and performance pieces, toured their work worldwide, and received multiple national and international awards, including the Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh International Festival 2013.
Since its inception Pan Pan has constantly examined and challenged the nature of its work and has resisted settling into well tried formulas. Developing new performance ideas is at the centre of the company’s raison d’être which is born from a desire to be individual and provide innovation in the development of theatre art. All the works created are original, either through the writing (original plays) or through an idiosyncratic response to established writings. Pan Pan tries to approach theatre as an open form of expression and has developed an individual aesthetic that has grown from making performances in a host of different situations and conditions. The theatre that Pan Pan creates is of a contemporary attitude with a lot of personal feelings attached.
Grace Weir’s A Reflection on Light is a new artist’s film that will comprise of a dynamic seemingly single shot that travels across different locations and histories to tell the history of a painting, Let there be Light by Mainie Jellett, which hangs in the School of Physics in Trinity College Dublin. This project began during Weir’s Artist-In-Residence in the School of Physics, and when complete will be the culmination of 3 years of research and development with the School of Physics, as well as a collaboration with composer and Trinity Lecturer, Linda Buckley, to create a soundtrack that will offer a sonic analogy to the concerns of the film. This film will premiere at The Irish Museum of Modern Art during Grace Weir’s solo exhibition 3 Different Nights, Recurring, which opens on the 7th Nov 2015. In April 2016 the film A Reflection on Light will be presented in an expanded installation and curated exhibition in the School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin.
Grace Weir studied at the National College of Art and Design, followed by an M.Sc in Multi-media Systems at Trinity College Dublin where she won a prize for her graduation project. Weir represented Ireland at the 49th International Venice Biennale in 2001 with her video installation 'Around now'. She has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. Weir was Artist-in-Residence in the School of Physics in Trinity College Dublin in 2012-2013 and is working towards a solo show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2015.