Dr Ailbhe Murphy Research Residency awarded to Vanessa Daws

 Create is pleased to announce Vanessa Daws as the recipient of the Dr Ailbhe Murphy Research Residency. 

Vanessa is a visual artist whose work explores place through swimming. Her art projects invite, involve and collaborate with different communities of interest and place. This interdisciplinary and social nature of her work creates multi layered and expansive outcomes that hope to share the joy of water to a wider audience, and to raise awareness in people’s minds of how precious our global waterways are to human and non-human life. 

Vanessa will use this Research Residency to explore our relationship to the water that surrounds us and the creatures in it, from a swimmer’s point of view, connecting with the Dublin Bay Biosphere. 

She plans to research the history of open water swimming in Dublin and Ireland, in particular women’s swimming. Of interest during this time will be how long distance swimming traverses invisible frontiers and how interconnected histories can be shared through swimmers’ stories from around the world, beyond Dublin. Vanessa also intends to research other artists and groups who work in an embedded art practice and a geographical way.  

The Research Residency, part funded by the Arts Council of Ireland, is designed to support an established collaborative arts practitioner with a research-focused practice. Vanessa will receive a suite of supports over one year to develop her thinking and delve deeply into the wider context in which her practice takes place. Vanessa will be hosted in Create’s new Reading Room and Archive, and supported to access material within these collections. Access is offered to one-to-one sessions with Create staff as well as key staff at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and the National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL, based at NCAD). This Residency will begin in September 2025. 

Ciaran Smyth, Vanessa Daws and Damien McGlynn pictured in the Create Reading Room. Photo: Vance Lau

Vanessa says: 

“This research residency will be such a welcome chance for dedicated time for reading and absorbing not only from the amazing archives at Create, IMMA and the NCAD library, but for reflection on my own practice and to be a catalyst for new and exciting future projects”. 

Dr Ciaran Smyth says: 

“As Ailbhe’s partner in life and in arts practice I know she would have been extremely pleased to see an award in her honour with such a strong focus on supporting research praxis in the field of socially engaged art. I was asked to be on the panel which has awarded the Dr Ailbhe Murphy Research Residency to Vanessa. I was impressed by the way she has combined an embodied personal practice of swimming with a wonderfully open, conversational approach to site-specific, in her case water-based, modes of ethnographic research that have both discovered and created new communities. I wish her every success with this exciting opportunity and look forward to following Vanessa’s research process through this residency as she delves deep into her practice and the Create archive and resources.”