Teresa Gillespie
​EMERGING VISUAL ARTIST AWARD WINNER 2013
An Arts Council, Wexford Arts Centre and Wexford County Council 
Partnership Initiative

Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford County Council and the Arts Council are pleased to announce that Dublin based artist Teresa Gillespie is the recipient of the seventh annual Emerging Visual Artist Award.

Image above: Among Objects - installation view, mixed media, 2012. Photograph by Davey Moor.

The initiative supports promising visual artists in Ireland through providing a monetary prize of €5,000 plus a solo exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre. This award is aimed at recognizing and supporting the development of committed emerging artists, in kick starting their career and achieving professional recognition. Following a national open competition selection process, Gillespie was selected from over hundred and twenty submissions received.

As the recipient of the award, Gillespie will be required to create a new body of work during the period of January – December 2014, which will be exhibited at Wexford Arts Centre during January 2015.

Gillespie works with mixed media to create intimate installations. Her recent arts practice consists of seemingly disparate elements such as sculpture, video, sound, photography, text and spoken word which are sensitively brought together in response to specific spaces in order to form particular environments. These environments are highly choreographed in anticipation of the viewer’s movements and as such, serve as a constructed stage for the individual to navigate. 

Gillespie’s ongoing interest is the physical and psychical space produced through the encounter between different bodies; human and non-human, animate and inanimate, and her current focus hones in on the intimate places created when these different bodies meet. Sensual and sensory experience, points of contact and material empathy are all concerns within her overall investigation and although she draws on texts, theoretical and otherwise to frame her work, these are not essential to the experience or understanding of the environments she creates. 

For the exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre, Gillespie will continue her exploration of these encounters using the work of American critic and theorist Vivian Sobchack and elements of Sartre’s novel Nausea to frame and direct her multi disciplinary investigation. The resulting exhibition intends to present alternative platforms for engagement through focusing on visual and language based experiences in spaces composed from fragments of everyday materiality. 

Teresa Gillespie is an artist living and working in Dublin.  She graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2001 with a first class honours degree in Fine Art and continued on to receive her Master of Arts from the Royal College of Art in London in 2006. Gillespie has exhibited both in Ireland and abroad and has been the recipient of many prestigious awards including the Scottish Arts Council Lottery Grant (2002), The RCA Society and Thames and Hudson Prize (2006), The Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council Arts Office Grant (2011) and most recently the Arts Council Ireland Visual Arts Bursary Award (2012).

Image above (left to right): 
Along the Borderlands Bends, installation view, mixed media, dimensions variable, 2011
Among Objects - installation view, mixed media, dimensions variable 2012
Along the Borderlands Bends, installation view, mixed media, variable sizes, 2011

For further information on the artist or the Emerging Visual Art Award please contact Catherine Bowe, Visual Arts Manager, Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Wexford on +353 (0)53 91 23764 or email catherine@wexfordartscentre.ie or Eugene Campbell, Clerical Officer, The Arts Department, Wexford County Council, Carricklawn, Wexford on +353 (0)53 9196500 or email eugene.campbell@wexfordcoco.ie.