Announcing: FSAS 2023/24 Residency Award Recipients

Fire Station Artists’ Studios are delighted to announce the recipients of the FSAS Residency Award 2023/24. The awardees are Kian Benson Bailes, Blaine O’Donnell and Alice Rekab. We are thrilled to welcome them to FSAS in the coming months.

About the artists
Kian Benson Bailes is an Irish artist residing in the northwest of Ireland. His multifaceted practice explores rural Ireland, visual language and identity. Recent exhibitions include ‘Culchie boy, I love you’, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, ‘Matters of Table’, Gorey School of Art, Wexford, and ‘Hashtag WIP’ Roscommon Arts Centre.

Blaine O’Donnell is an artist working primarily in sculpture. Taking an experimental approach to the materials and debris of photography, architecture and geology, he investigates the art object as a starting point for tracing networks of relationships between objects, humans and places. In a time of increasing dematerialisation and alienation from natural rhythms and shared ecosystems, O’Donnell explores artistic practice as a method of engendering moments of connection and affinity, revelation and wonder.
Recent exhibitions include hinder/further, The Complex, Dublin (2022) and Things To Do With Photographs, Gallery Augusta, Helsinki (2023). Recent awards include Visual Arts Bursary Award, Arts Council of Ireland (2021, 2022) and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios/HIAP International
Residency Exchange (2023).

Alice Rekab is a visual artist based in Dublin. Their practice is concerned with expressions and iterations of complex personal and cultural narratives. Rekab takes their own mixed-race Irish identity as a starting point from which to explore experiences of race, place and belonging. Their work centres processes of collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange from which they develop film, performance, print, text, and sculpture—creating new intersectional objects for exhibition. Recent Projects include Mehrfamilienhaus, Ricochet #14, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2023; Family Lines Project, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2021-22; Truth Flags Identity, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 2020; The Nomoli/Father talk, VERY Project Space, Berlin, 2019, and The Open Object, Stanley Picker Gallery, London, 2018.

Rekab’s work is held in the collections of Trinity College Dublin, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Cathal Ryan Trust and The Arts Council of Ireland. In 2023 they published their first artist monograph Alice Rekab: Mehrfamilienhaus with Museum Villa Stuck and Distanz Verlag Berlin.