AIC Scheme Bursary Award 2024 Recipients: Daniel Brennan and Lauryn McNamee

Create is pleased to announce Daniel Brennan and Lauryn McNamee as the recipients of 2024 Artist in the Community Scheme Bursaries.

Daniel Brennan is a writer, educator, collaborative artist and community organiser working across mediums including literature, film, theatre and beyond. His work explores methodologies for collaborative storytelling through collective dreaming with the goal to build new worlds inside the shell of the old. Daniel intends to use the bursary to build sustainable structures within his practice, integrating critical reflection and archiving of his career to date. He intends to consciously extend his practice of learning in public. Daniel will engage the mentorship of community artist Francois Matarasso, striving to look beyond subject position and discipline in examining what it means to be a selfless artist while sustaining oneself.

Lauryn McNamee is an artist and workshop-ist navigating the complex intersections of class, education and social power. Through participatory workshops, sound and built structures, they bring together working class communities to reimagine their social reality. Lauryn plans to engage in critical research during the bursary period, developing their material and technical skills, while working with mentor Veronica Dyas to address how to manage challenges that can arise when working with communities. This award will facilitate a period of consistent and deep research that would help Lauryn to weave together ongoing research strands and allow for new ideas to grow.

THIS ARCHIVE IS ALIVE AND STICKY (2024) Lauryan MacNamee Commissioned by Tallaght Community Arts.

The purpose of the bursary award, part of the Arts Council’s Artist in the Community Scheme, which is managed by Create, is to support and nurture professional arts practice, for an artist in any art-form who has a track record of working collaboratively with communities of place or interest in the making and interpreting of art. This is a developmental bursary aimed at practitioners who are facing particular barriers and/or challenges in developing their collaborative socially engaged arts practice.

The bursary of €15,000 will provide the artists with time and resources to engage with and reflect on their practice. More particularly, it allows them to consider key questions associated with their collaborative arts practice and collaborative methodologies. In addition, this bursary award offers bi monthly mentoring support from Create and up to two mentoring sessions with one of the experienced collaborative socially engaged practitioners from the Artist Mentor Panel.

The award emphasises the value and benefit to an artist’s development of an extended process of engagement with their practice, and seeks to provide artists with the time and resources to think, research, reflect and engage deeply with their practice. We look forward to supporting Daniel and Lauryn as they begin their bursaries in early 2024.