Louth & Meath Arts Offices today announced the successful recipients of their Age & Opportunity Tyrone Guthrie Residency Awards. Susan Connolly is the Louth winner while Fiona Kerbey is the Meath winner. Both artists receive a funded week-long residency in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, including a small stipend.
The awards aim to support professional artists aged 50+ to develop their practice, by creating time and space to think and reflect on their work and to bolster their peer network. The awards were opened for applications in May for artists based in Louth and in Meath.
Susan, from Drogheda in Louth, is a poet who has been published widely in journals and magazines throughout Ireland and the UK. Collaborations with writer and photographer Anne-Marie Moroney include Race to the Sea (1999) and Winterlight (2002). Several of her poems have been set to music by composers Michael Holohan and James Wilson and some of her work has appeared on The Poetry Programme on RTÉ Radio 1. In 2001 she was awarded the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. Susan has had 3 collections of poetry printed over the years and is currently working on her fourth which will be the main focus of her stay at the Centre.
Fiona Kerbey is from Meath and completed her MA at NCAD having previously graduated from Limerick School of Art & Design where she studied Ceramics. She has exhibited in curated selected shows nationally. In 2022 she had her first professional solo show at Droichead Arts Centre. Her work has been collected by Drogheda Municipal Art collection; Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda; Limerick City Gallery of Art and the Office of Public Works. She intends to concentrate on a body of new work during her stay at the Centre.
