EMERGENCE Visual Art Award Winner 2024  • Curated by Catherine Bowe

Wexford Arts Centre and Wexford County Council Arts Department, in partnership with South East Technological University, are pleased to present idir, a solo exhibition by Blaine O’Donnell, recipient of the 2024 EMERGENCE Visual Art Award. Idir will run in Wexford Arts Centre from Saturday, 13th June to Saturday, 25th July, 2026.

Blaine O’Donnell is an artist working primarily in sculpture. Taking an experimental approach to the materials and debris of photography, architecture, and geology, he investigates the art object as a site for tracing networks of relationships between objects, humans, and places.

O’Donnell’s practice is deeply rooted in material experimentation, with material agency and chance contributing to the work’s form.

For the EMERGENCE Award, O’Donnell has drawn upon geological sites in County Wexford and the architecture of the Wexford Arts Centre building. He has developed a new body of sculptural work incorporating moving image elements, to explore questions of temporality, repetition and translation.

Using the interplay between sculptural forms, contrasting materials and architectural context, O’Donnell stages unfamiliar encounters to explore ontological associations between disparate things, frequently returning to the fundamental question of when something becomes something else.

In 2024, Blaine O’Donnell won the EMERGENCE Visual Artist Award, a partnership initiative between Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford County Council Arts Department, andSouth East Technological University. Presented biannually, the award has a monetary value of €15,000 and includes mentorship support over the award cycle to the value of €2,000 and a solo exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre. In addition, the artist has the opportunity to engage with the Arts Campus of South East Technological University.