Fingal Arts Office announce the recipients of the artist mentoring award 2026:
Fingal County Council Arts Office is pleased to announce five Fingal artists have been selected to participate in the Artist Mentoring Programme 2026.
Fingal Arts Office announce the recipients of the artist mentoring award 2026:
Fingal County Council Arts Office is pleased to announce five Fingal artists have been selected to participate in the Artist Mentoring Programme 2026. The five professional artists selected are Maria Atanacković, Aoife Concannon, Chirs Forrester, Nathan Lowry and Beata Piekarska-Daly.
This professional one-year developmental programme for 2026-2027 is led by Sharon Murphy who has over 30 years’ experience with leading in the visual and performing arts in diverse contexts.
The five artists will avail of one-to-one mentoring with Sharon Murphy on a monthly basis over the year. The experienced mentor creates the environment for the artist to explore, test, probe, and create new pathways in this professional development initiative. This mutually engaged mentoring relationship aims to foster the artistic, personal, and professional growth of the artist at a time of change in their practice.
Fingal County Council Arts Officer Sarah O’Neil said on the announcement ‘We are delighted to announce five professional Fingal artists have been selected to work with Sharon Murphy for this year's mentoring programme. I have no doubt that with Sharon ‘s guidance the selected artists make meaningful connections allowing them to further develop their practice.''
About the artist:
Maria Atanacković;
Maria Atanacković is a visual artist working across printmaking, assemblage, and printed textiles. She studied Surface Design at the London College of Communication, is a studio member at Graphic Studio Dublin, and in 2025 completed the Professional Diploma in Digital Making at NCAD and Creative Spark Enterprise FabLab, graduating with First Class Honours.
Her practice moves between object and image, using surface as both structure and picture plane. She is drawn to simple geometric forms and the complexity that emerges when they are placed in relation to one another. Her background in print informs her approach to assemblage, particularly in how she thinks about repetition, layering, and colour. Play and structure coexist throughout: she works intuitively with materials while remaining deliberate in how elements are resolved. A central thread is her interest in pareidolia, the human tendency to find familiar forms within abstraction, which opens a shared space between artist and observer, extending the work beyond her authorship.
Her work has been shown widely, including solo exhibitions Navigating Space at Draíocht (2025) and Taobh le Taobh at Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich, Belfast (2025), and a two-person show with the late Tony O'Malley at Graphic Studio Gallery (2025). In 2025 she was selected to represent Ireland at Collect in London with the support of the Design & Crafts Council Ireland. Awards include the Fingal Arts and Ardgillan Castle Studio Residency Award (2025–2026), DCCI Future Makers Studio Award (2024), Arts Council Agility Awards (2021, 2023), Fingal Artist Bursaries (2023, 2024), and Best in Show at Signal Open (2024). Her work is held in the Irish State Art Collection, administered by the OPW.
Aoife Concannon:
Aoife Concannon is a visual artist with a socially engaged practice recently settled in Rush, Co Dublin.
Aoife's painting practice is both representational and abstract, in oils, acrylic and mixed media. The work is frequently somatic and of the body, with themes around motherhood, the female body and cycles of life/death in both humans and biosphere depicted, as symbolic responses to her durational social practice.
From 2021-2025 Aoife focused on a durational project exploring bodily experiences called EveryBODY, with the support of Arts Council Agility Awards 2022 and 2024. A strand of this work focused specifically on the bodily experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and the mothering body, which become her main area of response. She was awarded CREATE Artist in the Community award 2023 to work with a young mothers at CORE Youth Services in Inchicore.
Aoife was a studio member of Flux Studios in Dublin 8 from 2022-2025, and has recently established a home studio in Rush. She holds an MA in Social Art Practice from LSAD, and has been engaged in part-time study at the RHA in Painting since 2023.
Chris Forrester:
Chris Forrester is a visual artist, writer, and curator based in Dublin. Through the medium of writing, film, performance and sculpture he synthesises work that is personal, political and discursive, exploring cultural narratives around gender and sexuality. He was awarded the inaugural Fingal recent graduate award and is currently in residence in the Carnegie Free Library in Swords, focusing on community engagement in the arts through public events.
In 2025 he was Awarded the Fingal Grant Act Scheme and curated ‘In Place of Meaning’ alongside Emma Swan in the Carnegie Free Library in Swords. In 2026 he was awarded MART Gallery and Studio’s experimental residency in association with his collective F4G.NET where they developed the installation ‘Pokuta.’
In February of 2025 he took part in Scene+Heard Theatre Festival in Smock Alley, co-writing a show alongside Marcel Matys called Introduction to Charcoal, this staged life drawing class examines gender non-conforming and queer bodies. Other exhibitions he has taken part in include Silver Apples of the Sun, Golden Apples of the Sun(2025) Dublin Art Book Fair(2024), GradX(2024), Tread Lightly(2023), Transfusion(2023), Blurb(2022)and Extended Tactility(2022).
Nathan Lowry:
Nathan Lowry is an Irish figurative painter from Co. Dublin, Ireland. His work is concentrated on figural, representational painting. His work offers an insight into the candid and daily lives of people in contemporary Ireland. In particular, his work has been focussed on depicting the lives of those from the LGBTQI community. He thinks it is an essential part of modern culture that is often shied away from in fine art. As a gay person, he wants to see a more positive life view of the Queer community in Ireland, and he is proliferating this sentiment in his paintings.
Nathan was shortlisted in the AIB Portrait Prize 2025 at the National Gallery of Ireland for his painting, 'Circle of Life'. He has been included in galleries such as the Royal Hibernian Academy Annual, Draíocht Gallery, Outset Gallery, RUA RED, An Chéad Tine, UsFolk, The Dublin Painting and Sketching Club and more. He has also taken part on the televised portraiture competition, Sky’s 'Portrait Artist of The Year'. His work is also featured in printed media such as Profiles Journal, Abridged, Swerve Magazine and his own self published art book 'Process in Progress: Faces, Spaces and Figures’. In this book he discusses his art practice and his artistic influences which includes international ethnographic artefacts.
Beata Piekarska-Daly:
Beata Piekarska-Daly is an artist living and working in Fingal. She holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Visual Arts from Institute of Visual Arts at Zieloan Gora University, as well as a degree in History of Art from Trinity College Dublin.
Beata's expansive practice unites ephemera, sculptures, painting, video, and print and draws on a profusion of artistic inquiry and material possibilities. Daly is fascinated by the natural laws, science and the inter-media that function within contemporary life and it is from this that she distils her instinctive ideas.
Beata’s most recent exhibitions include the Hunt Museum, Limerick, Inaugural exhibition (2025/2026), Dunamaise Portlaoise Winter Group show (2025/2026) Bankside Gallery London (Nov 2025). In May 2026 she will undertake research residency in the Centre of Contemporary Sculpture, Oronsko, Poland and in July she will complete a month-long residency at the print studio at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre.
She has received numerous awards, including the Arts Council Ireland support for her ‘PainThING’ solo show and artistic book (2023), and Fingal Graphic Studio Award (2024) as well as the Tyrone Guthrie Award Age & Opportunity Award (2025). She is excited to begin working with Mentor Sharon Murphy having received the Fingal Arts Mentoring Award for 2026-2027.
For further information please see:
For further information please see:
www.fingalarts.ie
www.fingal.ie/arts