Westmeath artist receives €20k Arts Council Next Generation Award

Mullingar artist Avril Corroon has been awarded a prestigious Next Generation award by the Arts Council, the government agency for funding and developing the arts.

The award means Avril (website here), involved in visual arts, will receive €20,000, in effect to buy time to develop her practice. She is just one of 23 artists from all over the country who has been selected for the award.

Artists will also take part in a collective week-long residential programme in The Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, Co Monaghan, in early 2021. There, they will have the opportunity to engage with mentors and other supports to help shape their work into the future.

The Next Generation programme recognises and promotes a selection of artists from different disciplines, such as traditional arts, music, dance, film, theatre and literature.

“I feel extremely fortunate to be able to dedicate the next year towards developing my practice,” said Avril. “This award will allow for a period of full-time studio engagement, room to take risks and access to training and mentoring.”

Avril works with moving image, performance and sculpture to examine wealth inequity and situations where precarious conditions have become every-day. Primarily she has focused on the housing crisis and resulting acceptance of bleak living conditions such as mould in rental accommodation in London and Dublin.

Avril’s work represents these situations in a satirical and absurd form through juxtaposition and elaborate visual narratives, such as a video examining the ‘Landlord’ as monster, luxury cheeses made of toxic mould, performing on a city rooftop as the Airbnb logo, and covertly filming staff treatment in the service industry she’s worked.

In recent works fragrance and ingredients like perishable food are incorporated with the desire to intensify bodily communication and examine relations of taste and class, e.g. walking across a sticky wine-soaked floor, or recreations of masterpieces in leftover foods.

Arts Council Director Maureen Kennelly said the agency had received a large number of applications for the award this year, and that the standard had been particularly high.

“All of the artists have demonstrated an exceptional ambition and vision for their work, and the Arts Council is delighted to support them,” she said. “I look forward to following them in their work over the coming years.”

Previous recipients of the Next Generation award have included Donegal poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Kerry musician and composer Alma Kelliher and traditional musician Liam Scanlon.