This residency offers marginalised artists and arts practitioners who are from an asylum seeker, refugee and migrant background tailored support to meet their professional goals.

The residency offers each of the residents:

• Full access to our studio facilities
• One to one expert mentorship with monthly mentor meetings
• Monthly professional development and training workshops
• A programme of day trips to arts events throughout Ireland
• Quarterly support meetings with the Sample-Studios team
• An individual bursary per month for the duration of the residency

The residency includes:

• 6-month free Associate Membership with associated access to use the shared facilities and professional development programme.
• A fully-funded online course in curatorial studies from the NODE Centre for Curatorial Studies (http://www.nodecenter.org). The course must be chosen and taken before end 2023​
• Training in front of house, event management and planning, artist liaison, gallery management, administration, marketing and fundraising with programmed exhibitions.
• The opportunity to apply to curate an exhibition as part of Sample-Studios Visual Arts Programme with the full support of Sample-Studios. The curated exhibition must take place in 2023/4.
• Mentorship from an established professional curator.

This residency is run in partnership with UCC and awardees selected from relevant graduate and postgraduate courses.

In 2021, Sample-Studios established a new partnership with Spike Island. Our Project Coordinator Sinéad Barrett curated the work of four local artists Kate McElroy, Aoife Claffey, Pádraic Barrett and Deirdre Breen (Inter_Site Collective) in developing artwork for ‘Oiléan’, a spectacular event on Spike Island in September. The artists were given an opportunity to complete residencies on Spike Island over 3 months, and then they had the unique opportunity to present their work as part of a series of nighttime island tours on one of Europe’s most renowned heritage sites.

Spike Island has over 1300 years of Irish history which includes a remote monastery, a fortress to defend an empire and was formerly the world’s largest prison. In 2019, it was named Best Attraction at the International Travel and Tourism Awards. It is an island full of memories and stories which makes it an ideal location for artists to create new and ambitious work inspired by context. The artists who took part in the pilot residency in 2021 integrated these stories and contemporary accounts by former residents into their work and it is our intention that this information be used to inform future residencies, with an iterative research approach.

In Summer 2023/24, we will build upon this successful residency model established with Spike Island to host a series of residences on the island, supported by Sirius Arts Centre residency programme. Sirius Arts Centre, based in Cobh across the water from Spike Island are supporting these annual residencies with mentorship with Director Miguel Amado and provision of one of their artist apartments. The work developed as part of the residencies will culminate in an annual exhibition in The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion.

In the summer of 2023, emerging artist and member Eanna Heavey will explore contemporary masculinity and queer identity in this historic context of Spike Island during a residency on the island. The long history of Spike Island with all male institutional holdings that included monks and monasteries, rioters and redcoats, captains and convicts provides a rich site of activation for the themes and interests of Eanna’s practice relating to the male psyche and ‘toxic masculinity’. The psychosocial elements but also the cultural and political landscapes during Spike Island’s many different functions will also be an important dimension which he will explore through artistic film, photography, performance and drawing culminating in an exhibition at The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion.

Exploring these ideas within the historic context of Spike Island – most notably and with focus on its prevailing time as a prison which encapsulated, captured and manifested the darkest elements of the male psyche and experience – allows for bountiful analogy with which to create new work that directly addresses the concerns of Eanna’s practice. Yet even during the darkest times on Spike Island – there was still evidence of camaraderie, respect and creativity amongst the prisoners which the artist will honour through film, photography, performance and drawing.

Eanna is a Cork-based visual artist with a BA Hons in Fine Art from Crawford College of Art & Design. He received the ‘Best Moving Image Award’, ‘Cork Film Centre Exhibition Award’, ‘MART Gallery Graduate Exhibition Award’ & was invited to exhibit in Sarah Walker Gallery Cork. Member of Sample-Studios since 2018, with 110+ members was popularly voted to the position of Member Liaison. Founding member of ‘f-project’ artist collective with Cork Film Centre since 2018.