AIC Scheme 2025 Round One: Successful Recipients

Congratulations to all successful applicants to the AIC Scheme (Round One) in 2025, who come from a range of art forms and contexts.

Read more about each recipient, and their planned course of work, below.

Research and Development Award

Jan McCullough will engage with Female Woodworkers across Ireland to explore together how shared skills, gestures, and knowledge shape identity and the visibility of their work. This work will explore gender, labour, and representation.

Tomasz Madajczak and residents of Skibbereen and the broader West Cork region, will collaborate on a community-driven exploration of how Skibbereen’s Famine legacy and the residue of the Civil War shapes collective memory and identity. Through participatory photography, dialogue, and storytelling, local participants will document traces and express their observations about residue of trauma in their surroundings.

Yves Lorrhan Silva Santos and Inner Man, a group of Brazilian men will use dance and movement to reflect on what it means to be a man today. Masculine stereotypes emphasis a need to be strong and controlled, creating physical rigidity and limiting movement. This work willcreate a space for experimentation with movement, allowing participants to experience greater physical freedom, mobility, and awareness of their bodies creatively and artistically.

Research and Development Award with Mentoring Support

Fionnuala Doyle Wade and Roberta Ceginskaite will work with the Galway Branch of the Community Action Tenants’ Union (CATU) to develop a collaborative creative process for a housing action in the form of an outdoor movement-based spectacle. The artists will receive mentorship by Rita Marcalo.

Helen Flanagan will engage in a period of research and development with the Bunclody Traveller Women’s Group to research the relationship between Travellers and bogs, through walking, collecting, researching archive materials relating to bogs and Travellers, collage and zine making. Helen will be mentored by Kate Flood.

Robbie Blake and the Butterfly Choir intend to research and develop a collaborative vocal work and rehearsal process, sharing collaborative ideas, creative responses and musical expression around shared experience of loss and grief. Robbie will be supported in this by mentor Michelle Browne.

Silvina Sisterna and Dania Russo will work with Hijas del Fuego, Latin American activist women in Dublin, using walking as a research method, a powerful tool for reclaiming space, building solidarity, and challenging exclusionary narratives. Silvina and Dania will be mentored by Maud Hendricks.

Project Realisation Award

Glenbower Wood and Lake CLG will work with Philip Ryan and Mícheál Ó Catháin on Idir an Dá Linn, a collaborative expression of their shared desire to artistically acknowledge the loss of Glenbower Lake and deepen community connection with the woodland that remains. The group intends to co-create a community keen, a zine and short film, directly involving committee members and local residents.

Housing Action Now and Evelyn Broderick will use the Project Realisation award to create The Great Housing Crisis Caravanette of Revolt, a mobile structure critiquing systemic failures and serving as a platform for housing justice and knowledge exchange. The group will collectively build the caravanette while sharing its theatrical journey, developing skills  and activating conversations, performances and solutions with the support of additional artists Aaron Sunderland, Aengus Hennessy, Ray Hegarty and Kate O’Shea.

Tredagh Lodge Daycare Centre with Cathy Fowley will develop a film sharing stories and photographs developed with people living with dementia, serving to amplify an alternative discourse about dementia, and create “quiet advocacy” through film.

The women of Tintean Housing Association and Oonagh Murphy will collaborate on a co-created film, through-creation workshops, including 3 masterclasses with associate artists and shot in Waterford. The project builds on a community-based desire to create an art project that challenges stigma and centres the lived experiences of women experiencing homelessness.

Panel

The panel which determined this award was chaired by Paddy Glackin, former Arts Council Member, and consisted of Brian Hand, Lecturer, NCAD, Veronica Dyas, artist, and Joselle Ntumba, artist and curator. Tatiana dos Santos, AIC Scheme Support Officer, observed and took minutes, and Karen Whelan, Participatory Arts Support Manager, Arts Council, Áine Crowley, Programme Manager, Arts and Engagement, and Eftychia Spyridaki, artist, were observers.