Provost Patrick Prendergast announced the winners of the 2018 Trinity Creative Challenge Awards today, which aims to identify emerging creative talent and support innovative projects, including from staff and students of Trinity and associated colleges.
The recipients include visual artist Siobhan McDonald for “Future Breath” and performance artist Dylan Tighe with his piece “Pasolini’s Salò Redubbed”. The mixed media project “Centre for Genomic Gastronomy” also received an award.
Announcing the winners Prendergast, who first launched Trinity Creative Challenge in 2015, congratulated the awardees and stated: “I set up the Trinity Creative Challenge in order to catalyse innovative interdisciplinary projects in collaboration with Trinity staff and students. This year’s awardees will go on to create inspiring art that will be representative of this innovative synergy.”
A total of €40,000 will be distributed among two categories of prize winners. Those who are awarded prizes for the first time, which is the case with both Siobhan McDonald and Dylan Tighe, receive €15,000 to develop their new projects which will be presented within an exhibition or performance context in Trinity later this year. The second category awards previous Trinity Creative Challenge winners with an additional €10,000 to further develop an artistic project.
McDonald’s piece, Future Breath, is a new project comprised of a series of enquiries into environmental change, which include city pollution, toxicity and its impact on our health and ecosystems. The project takes the form of an installation and light projection to explore the human experience of climate change. “Future Breath” is about the importance of the air we breathe and the threat to plants nature we face due to climate change. Upon her receiving the award, McDonald expressed her excitement in collaborating with Trinity on her new project.
The other winner, “Pasolini’s Salò Redubbed” by Dylan Tighe is a research and development project based on a live redubbing of Pier Pasolini’s controversial 1975 film “Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom”. The project aims to transpose the source of the film, which updates the Marquis de Sade’s novel to Mussolini’s fascist Republic of Salò, to create a new context and script referencing institutional abuse and confinement in Ireland. This is done to understand and raise questions about the nature of the ideology underpinning church and state abuse and its contemporary legacy.
Tighe added: “The award will enable me to bring the ideas of a range of Trinity thinkers to bear on the development of my new performance project ‘Pasolini’s Salò Redubbed’ and will be a crucial support in making this artistic vision a reality.”
The Centre for Genomic Gastronomy was awarded by Trinity Creative Challenge before, and therefore received €10,000 this year. The funding will go towards “The Endophyte Supper Club,” which is an offshoot of their originally awarded project “Rare Endophyte Collectors Club”. The artists involved include Zack Denfeld, Catherine Kramer, Conor Courtney, and Emma Dorothy Conley.
The Trinity Creative Challenge is open to projects and ideas with a focus on interdisciplinary creative arts practices across a wide range of forms including performance, visual art, music, film, design, new media, animation, gaming and creative technologies.
