Kerry-based artist Laura Fitzgerald has been named a recipient of a 2024 Markievicz Award.
Kerry-based artist Laura Fitzgerald has been named a recipient of a 2024 Markievicz Award. The only visual artist among ten awardees, Fitzgerald will explore the recently discovered archives of pioneering experimental filmmaker Flora Kerrigan to produce a new body of work for exhibition at Lismore Castle Arts next summer.
Born in Cork in 1940, Kerrigan grew up in Summerhill and attended Crawford Art School. Her darkly comedic films won international amateur filmmaking awards and a selection was screened by RTÉ in 1965. An innovative young filmmaker influenced by Surrealism, she was an active member of Cork Cine Club from the late 1950s, becoming honorary secretary aged 20. Her live-action, animated and documentary shorts tackle themes of death, destruction and desire. However, Kerrigan’s Super 8 films faded into obscurity after she moved to the UK in the late 1960s. Fitzgerald, whose distinctive art also incorporates absurdist humour, will work with the Irish Film Institute and Sarah Arnold of Maynooth University to research Kerrigan’s archives and will produce new films, animations and text works.
Originally established as part of the Decade of Centenaries Programme, the Markievicz Awards aim to buy time and space for artists ‘to develop new work that reflects on the role of women in Ireland in the 20th century and beyond’. Fifty-two artists have been granted a total of almost €1.2 million since 2019. Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media Catherine Martin TD said the funding scheme has continued in response to ‘the significant impact of the award and the positive feedback and continued interest from the arts community’. The award honours Constance Markievicz (1868–1927), artist, revolutionary and the first woman to be elected to the Irish parliament and appointed to cabinet. Administered by the Arts Council in partnership with the department, the other recipients are: traditional musicians Zoë Conway and Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, theatre artists Pea Dinneen, Áine Ní Laoghaire, Sinéad Diskin and Róisín Stack, writers Megan Grehan and Katherine Lyons and composer Emma O’Halloran. Each awardee receives €25,000.
Cristín Leach
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