The RHA Studio Programme awards a number of artists' residencies at the RHA each year.
We are delighted to formally welcome artists, Fiona McDonald and Aleana Egan to the RHA studios as part of the 2022 - 2023 programme.
Fiona McDonald
Fiona McDonald is a Dublin-based interdisciplinary artist. She holds a BSc in Biological Chemistry from the University of Ulster a BA & MA in Fine Art from NCAD & a MSc in Multimedia Systems TCD. She is a current Artist in residence in innovation and technology at Talent Garden on DCU Alpha Campus. In 2019 she was an http://urgentenuiry.ie Artist In Residence. She is a 2018 recipient of the Arts Council Bursary Award and a current visiting research assistant of OMG Orthogonal Methods Group at CONNECT the Science Foundation Ireland research center for future communication networks.
Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition “Transcoding - The Living Mountain” at Talent Garden ,DCU Alpha Campus. “Woman in the Machine” at VISUAL Gallery Carlow for which her work won the ARTWORK Prize 2021 . Solo exhibition “Gateways” at Roscommon Arts Center 2018 curated by Linda Shevlin. A commission from Science Gallery Dublin for the Incase Of Emergency Exhibit 2017-2018 Light Lines at Mermaid Arts Center 2017 ,Quantum Leap at Foundation15 and U-turn at The Library Project in August 2015. In 2019 she was AIR on “An Urgent Enquiry Residency” In 2016 she was an Art in Science Resident at UCD Parity Studios, Dublin. Other residencies include Digital Media Residency at Firestation Artist Studios Dublin & Project studio award at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios.
She has taken part in group exhibitions at Broadstone Studios, LAB Gallery, Green on Red Gallery, Hugh Lane Gallery, the Digital Hub, & the Drawing Project ,Dublin. Her works have been exhibited internationally in Copenhagen, Paris, New York LA & at the Cologne Art Fair. In 2017 & 2016 she worked as a visiting lecturer on the Interactive Design MA at NCAD. From 2013-2015 she also worked as a part-time media lecturer on the MA ,Art in the Digital World & with BA Media Students at NCAD. She has also worked as a part-time Print lecturer at IADT & DIT . Her work is included in collections AIB, UCD, Digital Hub, Thomas St, Dublin, Scott Tallon Walker, Arc
mcdonafiona@gmail.com
Image: Fiona McDonald, Install shot of Blanketbog, 7130 in Woman in the Machine . Photo credit: Aisling McCoy
Aleana Egan
Working primarily with sculpture, and occasionally with painting and film, Aleana Egan engenders psychological states and memories through enigmatic arrangements of objects and forms. Her sculptural works appear restrained, but are laden with subtle references to the built environment. An airy, slender metal structure might echo an architectural form plucked out of the landscape, while her use of simple household materials – plaster, cardboard, matte paint and various fabrics – speak to the domestic. Egan’s practice is shaped by her deep engagement with works of literature and cinema: never opting for direct representation, she uses this source material as an entryway, absorbing the moods and tones it evokes. Her forms and shapes act as traces or shifting responses, tentative articulations of remembered places or everyday moments. A meandering, sensuous line and sense of fluidity is carried from her sculptures into her film and painting, giving form to a sense of flux, openness and mutability.
More recently works are made up of constituent parts, each forming a social relationship with the other. Recent solo exhibitions include small field, Künstlerhaus Bremen (2021), New People, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Duesseldorf (2020) Spitze, Farbvision, Berlin (2019); A House and Its Head, Kerlin Gallery (2017); Recent group exhibitions include Feeling of Knowing, The Complex, Dublin from narrow provinces, Cample Line, Dumfrieshire, Scotland (2019); staring forms, TBG&S(2019); Aleana Egan/Pearl Blauvelt, Mary Mary, Glasgow(2018)
Aleana Egan lives and works in Dublin.
aleana.egan@gmail.com
Image: Aleana Egan, Slow Music, 2021, Künstlerhaus Bremen. Photo: Fred Dott.
Current artists in-situ include Dominique Crowley and Joanne Reid.
Dominique Crowley was awarded the RHA Graduate Studio Award 2021 - 2022.
Crowley grew up in Galway in the West of Ireland. After a career in Medicine, she decided to study Fine Art, first in the Royal Drawing School in London and then in Canada. After completing a BFA (Hons) in OCADU ( Ontario College of Art and Design University) in Toronto, she returned with her family to settle in Dublin. She has recently completed an MFA in Art in the Contemporary World in the National College of Art and Design (NCAD). Combining the study of contemporary culture and painting practice, Dominique has pursued her interest in the environment. Aspects of how contemporary culture have been influenced by digital mediation and in particular by the mode of the visual is the subject of her MFA Major Practice Project. Telemorphosis, Second Nature considers a cultural turn driven by information technologies.
Drawing on Les Immatériaux, the 1985 exhibition curated by Jean-François Lyotard which proposed art as a medium of philosophy, Telemorphosis considers not only how technology has changed society but also how its relationship with humans has become so intimate as to change the way we perceive and are perceived in the world. In addition to crossing precincts between science, philosophy and linguistics, Lyotard proposed the exhibition as a means to transgress the boundaries of the written word, resisting synthesis and approaching the event of thinking. Telemorphosis, Second Nature, in 2020, is at that future point predicted in Les Immateriaux in 1985. No longer science fiction, It is an expression of this modern experience which resists both consciousness and language.
Joanne Reid was awarded the Fingal Arts Award 2021 - 2022.
Joanne Reid’s works employ various articles of daily use or industrial building materials, in this case paper bags, white tiles and neon tubes. She then builds these into installations based on freely associative allusions to archaic sacral spaces. That is, to a world radically different from that of the “white cube”, the setting of the art scene, with which they nevertheless share certain basic features that Reid explores. The medium at the very least played a completely different role, of symbolic expression, or even the explicit embodiment of eternal life and life after death. This work was inspired some time ago by the realization that the ancient Egyptian denomination for a sculptor meant “he who keeps alive”, which in her case denotes working with discarded “dead” objects. This is also true for two works she presents as interrelated, placed so as to form a certain hieratic composition. The first work with neon tubes evokes a sort of magic sign, of which an important feature is its title, Dead End. Two paper bags turned upside down and placed on a base of white ceramic tiles are reminiscent of a monument sculpted from stone.
