CCA Graduate Award: Anne McAlarney

Anne McAlarney is the MFA recipient of the CCA Graduate Award for students graduating in 2023 from the University of Ulster's BA Fine Art and MFA courses. The Award consists of the opportunity to use CCA's Project Space and a mentoring session with CCA Director Catherine Hemelryk.

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Anne will be using the project space to further develop paintings and poetry. She will use the space to test and temporarily exhibit groupings of work. This work aims to challenge audiences,
encouraging discourse within the practice of drawing, painting and poetry. Painting as thought catalyst rather than material form is inherent in this work. Here painting is methodology, translation, interlaced, and woven into through and beyond, in a perpetual state of becoming. Simultaneously persistent moments of poetry (as material language and adventures of form) are also explored within this work.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Anne McAlarney is a visual artist based in Co. Down. Her work explores tensions between the lost and found. Ethereal phenomena and ideas are traversed and transformed, fusing sculpture, photography, word play, drawing, painting and more recently video. She intersperses abstraction with reflective analytical thoughts, using voice sounds as language but also an anti-language. Proximity of voice and image to construct a changed language, a glimpse into another knowledge or type of knowledge. The visible and invisible, always in transition, are asserted within the work she produces. She is a recipient of the Alice Berger Hammerschlag Award 2021, ACNI SIAP Award 2022, ACNI Travel Award 2022, Siobhan McQuade Memorial Painting prize chosen by Hugh Mullholland MAC Belfast 2023, Centre for Contemporary Art Award 2023, NMDDC Bursary for the Tyrone Guthrie Centre 2023. Her poetry has been included in The Cultural Afterlife of Ruins, Making The Future Project and in the anthology Visions (The Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing). She is a member of Artlink, Interface and graduate of Ulster University BA (hons) Fine Art 2013 and MFA 2023 Distinction. Her work has been selected for exhibitions nationally within Ireland. Beyond Silence Listened For, her first solo exhibition internationally, was in Galleri Kronborg, Bergen, Norway 2022. Forthcoming exhibitions include Interface Galway 2024 and Down Arts Centre 2025.
annemcalarney.com

Previous CCA Graduate Award recipients include:
2023 Anne McAlarney (MFA), Naomi Ferguson (BA)
2022 Charys Wilson (MFA, David Younglove (MFA)
2021 Susan Hughes (MFA), DreamBean (BA)

Image: Anne McAlarney, detail of a bright nowhere, 2022. Oil paint on braided cable, variable dimensions. Photo credit Paul Marshall.