Sorcha's art is Taylor made
A Cork artist has been recognised as the most promising emerging visual artist in Ireland for 2024.
Sorcha Browning picked up two awards at the RDS Visual Art Awards last Friday including the 2024 RDS Taylor Art Award, the event’s top honour.
The prestigious award, which comes with a €10,000 prize, was in recognition of her ground-breaking two-channel film installation, ‘Eden’.
The work, which includes a triptych sculpture, monitor screen, and dynamic lighting, explores themes of online performativity, digital cycles, and the psychological effects of technological immersion.
‘Eden’ mirrors the fixed perspective of representational painting to allow each character’s performance to play out simultaneously. Rather than instructing the gaze of the viewer through the scene, each character captures attention through sound, gesture, and physical expression.
The installation also bagged her the RDS Graphic Studio Dublin Emerging Visiting Artist Award which has a €5,000 value and will see her take up a two-week residency with a Master Printer at Graphic Studio, Dublin.
Browning is a graduate of BAVA Sherkin Island, a degree programme that nurtures skills across drawing, painting, digital art, and sculpture.
Her practice explores the relationships between performativity, iconography, and data collection. Sparked through her own sense of ambiguity around cookie collection, she began thinking about the storing and collecting of data as a kind of performative trace left throughout the online world. The “trace” in this instance as something that is feeding mechanised systems of extraction that rely upon a vast amount of inequalities, hierarchies and misleading aphorisms.
On receiving her awards, Browning credited the BAVA Sherkin Island programme as being instrumental in shaping her artistic voice.
“The opportunity to develop my practice in such a unique and immersive environment has been invaluable,” she said.
Aisling Moran of the Sherkin Island Development Society added: “Sorcha’s success underscores the vital role BAVA Sherkin Island plays in shaping Ireland’s contemporary art scene.”
The RDS Taylor Art Award, founded in 1860, has long been a cornerstone of Irish visual arts, supporting emerging talent. Previous winners include acclaimed artists Walter Osborne, Mainie Jellett, Norah McGuinness, and Louis le Brocquy.
The award offers significant exposure, funding, and a platform for early professional practice.
Commenting on the talent this year, the 2024 RDS VAA judging panel, chaired by Crawford Art Gallery Director, Mary McCarthy, said: “As a jury we were bowled over by the diversity and quality of all the shortlisted artists.
“The works engage with contemporary issues of identity, and the body politic. We anticipate they will resonate with the exhibition’s various publics. We are very excited about the future of Irish art based on this exhibition,” the jury added.