The artists nominated by

Becks Butler is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Design,GCD. She has presented work in various group shows in spaces such as illuminations, Pallas Projects, The Royal Irish Academy and The Complex.

Becks was awarded the M11 PerCent for Art Commission (2019) with her collaborators and recently presented Performing the Post-human at the Museum of Contemporary Photography of Ireland in association with PhotoIreland’s Critical Academy (2019). Her new body of work ‘Loopies Field’ was recently supported by Culture Ireland initiative #IrelandPerforms (2020).

Garry Loughlin is a lens based artist whose work is research driven, incorporating photography, writing and archival material. His interests lie in the use of power, and the control of narratives and territories by those with that power. He is driven by unearthing micro-histories and the discovery of elements that can link series' of events that might initially seem isolated. Working primarily with photography allows him to employ the language of documentary to challenge the perceived authority of the indexical image and its role in the distribution of history.

Loughlins work can meet its audience in various formats and he is increasingly interested in formats which relate to or challenge notions of objective truth, such as publications and performance lectures.

Loughlin holds a MA in Documentary Photography from University of South Wales. In 2019 he exhibited his latest body of work The Clearing House in Test Space at Spike Island, Bristol. He is the author of two self-published monographs; Between Spaces (2014) and A farewell to Arms (2016). His work has been exhibited in a number of exhibitions throughout Ireland, Europe and the UK.

Mark McGuinness (b.1991) is a photographer from Dublin, Ireland. After working as a freelance commercial assistant, Mark began working as a production assistant for Magnum photographer, Jacob Aue Sobol. Soon after that he began focusing on long term personal projects.

His first work ‘Dreaming of Figure Eights’ (2017) saw him return to South Lebanon to explore the affect of power and influence on the landscape. The work was selected for the Kassel Dummy award 2017 and was exhibited both in Ireland and abroad. In 2017 he was selected to represent PhotoIreland as part of Parallel - European Photo Based Platform, the body of work which was produced through the program was exhibited at a number of photo festivals throughout Europe. In 2018 he was nominated for the World Press Photo Joop Swart masterclass and in 2019 became the inaugural Irish participant in the European Investment Bank’s Artist Development Program in Luxembourg.

Mark is currently working on a number of projects and in 2018 started a Masters degree in photography at Aalto University School of Arts, Design, and Architecture in Helsinki. His ongoing research is focused on 19th century colonial activities in Ireland, particularly the mapping of Ireland, and the affects these activities had on Irish cultural identity and representation.

Shia Conlon is an artist working with photo, film, text and sculpture. Much of their work has been centered around marginalized voices and about growing up in the landscape of working class Catholic Ireland.

Their work has been exhibited in London, New York, Dublin, Helsinki, and Montreal amongst others. Their work has also been written about in The New York Times, i-D, Dazed and Confused and Huffington Post UK and US. They work between Tipperary and Helsinki. They are assistant to Elina Brotherus.

In their past work, Conlon used pop-culture references, utilising the online platform with Bunny - a collective founded by Conlon - as well as producing zines, using these seemingly non-cultural or mass-culture tools to communicate with a wider, contemporary arts audience.

Vera Ryklova is a Dublin based artist, working in lens-based media. Currently undertaking MA in Art and Research Collaboration (2021) at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dún Laoghaire, she graduated from the same Institute in 2015, with a BA (Hons) in Photography.

Ryklova presented her first solo exhibition in 2018 at Triskel Arts Centre in Cork (IRL). Her work has been also featured in a number of group exhibitions held in Republic of Ireland as well as in UK, including the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallery in Dublin, the Ulster Museum in Belfast (NI/UK), and the FiLiA feminist conference in London and Manchester (UK). She was shortlisted for the Hennessy Portrait Prize in 2016, which exhibited at the National Gallery of Ireland, and she is the winner of the 2017 Hotron Art Works Prize for work by a recent graduate.

Her work was also reviewed in the photographic magazine Source under Source Graduate Photography 2015, and is included in the Art Collection of Trinity College Dublin.

In her practice Ryklova explores both the social construction of the self and the self-concept. Through the medium of her own body and using her own – subjective – experience she intimates a woman’s reality to the public eye while concerning her socially formed traits.

Performing to the camera she produces series of photographic and video self-portraits that reveals an emotional conflict driven by role expectations and embedded social practices.

The creative approach she has developed gives the camera the function of a distancing device that she utilises for her to experience a state of catharsis. She links the execution with the liberating emotional discharge. Making her work serves as a coping strategy, this adds an extremely personal aspect to her practice, but still touches on universal human experiences.

Ryklova’s activities are also engaged in curatorial practice. As a curator she presented two group exhibitions in Dublin, in 2015 at Steam Box Galleries and in 2017 at The Complex.

Originally from the Czech Republic, Ryklova was brought to Ireland on a journey of personal discovery and since 2007 she has been living and working there.