AIC Scheme 2025 Round Two: Recipients

Congratulations to all successful applicants to the AIC Scheme (Round Two) 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

Elizabeth Dirwall and Sarah Walmsley will engage with The High Cs Rosslare Harbour to research, celebrate, and develop Rosslare Harbour’s maritime musical heritage through the tradition of sea shanties. By grounding the work in community collaboration and oral history, they seek to explore together how these songs can reflect contemporary local identity and lived experience.

Jessica Rodriguez and FLINTA* Book Club will work together to explore a central question: how can literary discussions and lived experiences be translated into a shared visual language? Using a series of workshops employing methods like participatory stop-motion, collective collage and zine-making, this transforms passive reading into active, co-authored world-building, creating a framework for community self-representation.

Luke Corcoran will work with Aiséirí Addiction Treatment Services through a series of workshops and conversations where participants can explore different creative possibilities together to share their lived experiences of addiction.

Rachel Parry and Speckled Egg Dance will research and develop practice models to facilitate intellectually disabled adults to engage creatively through dance and film, including addressing their interests, concerns, aesthetics and logistics of this artistic inquiry.

Andrea Scott and The Elders will research people who achieved success in later life, building the foundation for an inspirational, attitude changing theatre piece based on these stories.

Anna Wiercioch and Arvagh Hen Shed will use this R&D phase to explore themes of identity, belonging, history and rural life. Together they will hold story-sharing sessions and creative “taster labs,” trying out multiple art forms such as collage, textiles, photography, puppetry and simple sculpture, in order to lay the foundation for a future public project that reflects local voices and rural heritage.

Ki McBride and Gyles Quay Community Action Group will work together to explore ideas for a future project exploring memory, belonging, and responses to proposed industrial expansion in the area. The project aims to create a collaborative space where non-artists and community members can share knowledge, experiences, and perspectives, while investigating how art can function as a tool for collective resistance.

Ali Clarke will engage with Intercultural Women’s Network to address xenophobia and promote intercultural connection through art. Sessions will focus on shared human experiences like play, grief and joy. The goal is to create an inclusive, empathetic space for shared learning exploring our shared human experience.

Research and Development Award with Mentoring Support

Annah Knight and the Creative Choir Collective will hold workshops to share narratives of loss and explore possible visual art directions, experimenting with sculptural and collective forms. The project develops new creative possibilities, strengthens solidarity, and amplifies marginalised maternal voices often left unacknowledged. Annah will receive mentorship from Dr Sinead McCann.

Ciara Buckley will work with Afghan Women, NASC, Cara CSG, and Respond Housing Association to explore collaborative storytelling with Afghan refugee women in West Cork, providing a platform for them to share their stories, cultural identities, and lived experiences. The focus will be on building trust, encouraging creativity, and investigating how film or other art forms might be used to give voice to participants’ and their experiences.  Ciara will engage with mentor Treasa O’Brien during the R&D phase.

architecture[vb], a collective formed by Irene Barrenetxea Arriola and Jamie Topping, and Lusk Community Council will engage in collaborative design sessions, supporting the community to identify their spatial needs, thereby informing proposals, materials, and prototypes that culminate in a project that is rooted in the lived experience of its users. The artists will be mentored by Orla Murphy.

Lisa Hester and residents of The Ennis Road Care Facility will use the R&D phase to explore how the idea of home is remembered, shared, and adapted. Residents will take part in weekly group and one-to-one sessions, experimenting with various modalities, including collage, textiles,sound, and poetry. The work emphasises co-ownership and reflection, with creative materials gathered into a living archive of memory and place to nurture a stronger sense of belonging within the care setting. Lisa will work with mentor Caroline Schofield.

Project Realisation Award

Limerick City Build and artist Darren Ryan will work together on “iSelf”, a collaborative photography project with people recently released from the penal system. Using mobile phones, participants will create self-portraits, images of daily life, and objects of meaning, supported by workshops in technical and creative skills. This project promotes inclusion, dignity, and dialogue, while providing collaborators with skills, confidence, and a platform to challenge stigma and share their lived experiences.

Dunkineely Community CLG/ Creative Communities and artists Jessica Patterson and Joselle Ntumba will work together on “Connecting Through our Lens”, a participatory project uniting a multi-vocal community through shared histories of rural life, diaspora, and shifting belonging. Via four artistic activations and bus journeys, a collective repository of rural identity will be created. Using photography, oral history, folklore, and textiles, collaborators will share personal narratives through their unique lens, centering lived experience to challenge dominant stories of belonging and co-author new ones.

Pies Para Qué will engage with artists Silvina Sisterna and Dania Russo on “Mis pies, mi casa”. Over eight months, Latin American migrant women in Dublin will walk, write, and create visual works together, exploring the intersection of migration and gender as a way of reclaiming their presence in the public sphere. The process will culminate in a public exhibition with installations, writings, and a performance film. At its heart, the project uses art to make visible our stories and to affirm walking together as an act of strength and resistance.

Tuam Mother and Baby Home Alliance and artist Holly Mullarkey will co-create “Porcelain Voices”. The project will provide porcelain clay workshops for survivors of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home Alliance including imprinting delicate lace from a local women’s lace project. Workshops will have facilitation for participants to speak and write their feelings and thoughts and stories in this safe and creative space, words to be used in a lament composed and performed by a local women’s choir.

Panel

The panel which determined this award was chaired by Helen Shaw, former Arts Council Member, and consisted of Dominic Thorpe, Visual Artist, Johnathan Santos, Multidisciplinary Artist, and Sarah Browne, Multidisciplinary Artist. 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 Fiona O’Neil, NEIC Community Arts Programme coordinator, were observers.