CATEGORY

News: Announcing FSAS 2025 Evolve Practice Award Recipients

26 February, 2025

FSAS is delighted to announce the 2025 Evolve Practice Awardees are: Léann Herlihy (Digital Media), Luke Van Gelderen (Digital Media), Niamh McGuinne (Sculpture) and Lily O’Shea (Sculpture).

Digital Media:

Luke van Gelderen works across video, sculpture, and digital media, creating immersive installations that examine the performance and mediation of contemporary identities through technology. Converging celebrity culture, alienation, masculinity and violence, his work is grounded in his own experience of recurring intrusive thoughts and images amplified by the internet. Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Romeo Save Me’ Pallas Projects/Studios, (2024); ‘unrecognisable (spillway)’, Ormond Art Studios (2020); ‘My Activity’, Rua Red (2019); and ‘Chatroulette’, K4 Galleri, Oslo (2019). Recent group exhibitions include: ‘Planned Obsolescence’, Seager Gallery, London (2025); ‘All Flowers in Time Bed Towards the Sun’, Dublin Castle, OPW (2025); ‘*-*’ Catalyst Arts, Belfast UK (2024); ‘Uncanny Valley’ Palazzo Bronzo, Genoa, Italy (2024); ‘REAL’, B63, Witten, Germany (2024); ‘this is perfect, perfect, perfect, Transmediale, Berlin (2024); ‘Manslows Hammer–Periodical Review 13’, Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin (2023); ‘LOCKJAW’, Ranelagh Arts Centre, Dublin (2023); ‘FAKE BODY”, Platform Arts, Belfast (2023) and ‘Rendering New Realities’, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2021). Recent screenings include: Goldsmiths, University of London (2025); D-AZ, Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland (2024); UNTHINKABLE, Hull, UK (2024); Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, Germany (2024) and Toxi Space, Zurich (2024). Luke is a co-founder of CRUX, an off-site curatorial collective. He lives and works in Dublin and is a current studio member in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. His work is kindly supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.

Léann Herlihy (they/them) is an artist, researcher and educator based in Dublin.

Their practice is informed by trans*, queer ecological, feminist and abolitionist theoretical frameworks which deploys alternative modalities of expression through an array of mediums including live performance, video, billboards, sculpture, text, workshops and radical pedagogies.

Rigorously and creatively critiquing the positioning of Otherness in a heteronormative society, Léann actively transgresses beyond ‘Other’ as another tick-box option to choose from and moves to explore the generative capacity of collective engagement and resistance when we abolish colonial and capitalist prescriptions of personhood, the body and gender.

Sculpture:

Niamh McGuinne is a Dublin based visual artist, and MFA graduate of NCAD (2020). Her practice combines print, sculpture, film and installation. The embodiment of psychological experience and the nature of physical response are important and recurring themes in her practice where she focusses on the interplay between fragility and resilience, ease and discomfort, temporality and permanence. These concepts are informed by her conservation background. She holds an MA in Fine Art Conservation and currently works in the National Gallery of Ireland where she has developed a deep appreciation for the transformative processes of materials over time.

Her solo shows ‘Carapace’ (2023) in the Highlanes Drogheda and ‘ Sojourn’ (2024) in Rathfarnham Castle addressed the symbolic exploration of the body as a shell – in which to develop and how time and growth are marked and interpreted. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and also as a member of Shell/Ter Artist Collective and MIDDEN. Awards include a Visual Arts Bursary in 2021, Centre Culturel Irlandais artist in residence in 2023 and is an artist in residence with the School of Organic Chemistry in TCD where chromophoric materials and how they can be used to mimic biological tissue is the subject of her research.

Lily O’Shea is a visual artist based in Cork, working across sculpture, text, and performance. Through woodwork, Lily develops quasi-sculptural structures that evolve into immersive installations, incorporating video, performance, and reflective texts. Lily’s current work looks at a shifting rhythm of time in contemporary culture, defined by a growing sense of immediacy and uncertainty. This research explores different methods of survival in a fluctuating ideological structure, while emphasizing the need to reclaim and redefine our relationship with
time.

Since graduating from Crawford College of Art and Design in 2020, Lily has exhibited widely, including her debut solo exhibition slow puncture at The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion, Cork (2021). She has participated in residencies at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, The Guesthouse, Backwater Artists Group and 126 Gallery and Studios. Recent work has been featured in Bless The Corners of This House, Bloomers, Cork (2025); The Collision Project, screen service, Dublin (2024); DISTRO: The Reading Room with Muine Bheag Arts, Carlow (2024); and CCA
Introducing at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry (2024).

Lily is currently a studio member at Sample-Studios, Cork. Recent recipient of the Visual Arts Bursary 2024 and the Agility Award 2024 and was previously awarded the Creative Practitioner Bursary 2023 from Galway City Council.