Mayo artists receive Arts Council Next Generation awards

THE Arts Council has awarded €500,000 to 20 Next Generation award recipients.

Éadaoin Ní Mhaicín is the sole Mayo-born representative to be honoured and one of only two traditional musicians nationwide.

Other artists with connections to the county - Alice Kinsella, Mary Lou McCarthy and Aine O'Hara - have also been named as recipients.

The Next Generation bursaries are awarded to promising emerging artists across all disciplines at an early but pivotal stage of their career. The award allows artists to buy time to develop their work and to be able to show their potential to advance and strengthen a distinctive and assured creative practice.

The successful recipients have demonstrated in a compelling way how the award and the financial investment at this particular time will have a transformative effect in bringing them to the next stage of their artistic development.

Each artist received an award of €25,000 and they are invited to participate in a collective week-long residency in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, in the spring of 2023.

Éadaoin Ní Mhaicín is an award-winning multi-instrumentalist from Mayo. She has appeared on world-learning stages, such as Broadway, Croke Park, RDS, Marlay Park, the National Concert Hall, the Barbican Theatre in London, and at Áras an Uachtaráin to perform at the invitation of President Michael D. Higgins.

Éadaoin plays with the National Folk Orchestra of Ireland and has appeared on numerous national and international radio/television stations, including RTÉ, BBC, Virgin Media One and TG4.

Alice Kinsella was born in Dublin in 1993, and raised in Mayo, where she now lives. Her poetry pamphlet Sexy Fruit (Broken Sleep Books) was a Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Selection. She edited Empty House: poetry and prose on the climate crisis (Doire Press, 2021).

Kinsella’s creative non-fiction debut Milk will be published by Picador in spring 2023.

The third Mayo awardee, Mary-Lou McCarthy, is a writer and actor working across theatre, film/TV and radio, with a particular focus on work for young audiences.

In 2020, she was commissioned by The Civic's Ready, Steady, Show! programme to develop The Dead Letter Office. The play explores themes of migration and belonging for ages 9+ and will premiere in October 2022.

Mary-Lou is a fluent Irish speaker and a graduate of Drama and Theatre Studies from UCC. Her work is supported by Branar's Meitheal initiative. She is based in Co. Mayo.

Áine O'Hara is a Dublin-based multidisciplinary artist, theatre maker and designer, who has lived and worked in Mayo. Her work is interested in blurring the lines between community building and art.

Áine has presented work nationally and internationally and their work has been supported by Dublin Fringe Festival, A4 sounds studios, Arts and Disability Ireland and the Arts Council of Ireland.