Arts Council announces £1.04 million National Lottery investment to support individual artists

Artists awarded grants through the Arts Council’s Support for Individual Artists Programme General Art Awards will receive up to a maximum of £6,000 each. This funding investment will be used to develop new creative projects and purchase equipment, as well as grants to support international performance opportunities and residencies.

Gilly Campbell, joint Director of Arts Development, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, commented:

“Individual artists are at the very heart of the creative sector in Northern Ireland, enriching our communities and bringing our theatres, music venues and galleries to life. Thanks to National Lottery players and money raised for good causes, funding from the Arts Council’s Support for Individual Artists Programme will provide artists, working across all areas of the arts, with the vital investment they need to embark on new projects, develop their ideas and find new and engaging ways to present their art.”

General Arts Awards are one element of the Arts Council’s Support for Individual Artists Programme (SIAP). Its aim is to support artists living and working across Northern Ireland to create work and develop their practice. Broadly, awards can be for specific projects, specialised research or personal artistic development.

Case studies

Sean O’Neill, awarded £3,885 (Fermanagh and Omagh)

Sean O’Neill is an emerging artist who broke out onto the dance scene just over two years ago. He has worked in film, theatre and TV including in Disney’s Enchanted and NI Opera’s La Triviata. He is the lead artist at DU Dance’s Belfast Boys Project, who were invited to participate in the prestigious U. Dance Festival UK in 2023.

Funding from the Arts Council will support the creation of The Fear of Fír, which is a project centred around the many fears, hopes, struggles and dreams of rural communities within Mid-Ulster and an exploration of the mental and physical being of the men throughout the community. It will ask, where does the rural male mentality and voice sit? Sean will work alongside playwright Aoiby Johnson to create a narrative for the dance theatre piece and performance at the CRAIC theatre.

Dianne Campbell, awarded £5,944 (Belfast)

Dianne Campbell, best known by her moniker Die Hexen, is a composer, sound artist and film maker. She has won multiple awards for her work including from the British Independent Film Awards, the Irish Television and Film Academy, and has been nominated for Academy Awards. Her work merges composition with unconventional sound elements to create a unique, highly innovative, sonic experience in music, often within the horror genre.

Funding from the Arts Council will be used to support her project Interactive Tools for Creating Music as a Neurodivergent Composer. The investment will allow Dianne to purchase equipment to improve her current workstation, enabling her to create more complex and expressive music.

Enda Kenny, awarded £3,195 (Belfast based artist, project will be presented in Armagh)

Enda Kennedy is a visual artist who is well-known for his costume and prop making work within theatre, tv and film. He has created headdresses for recent films including The Northman and received an Irish Times Theatre Award in 2020 for Best Costume Design. He also works as an arts educator, and an associate lecturer in alternative materials with the University of Arts London, as well as facilitating craft/millinery workshops with the Market Place and Island Arts Centre.

The artist received an award from the Arts Council to help him to develop his first solo show exhibition titled Corporality, opening at the Market Place Gallery, Armagh in January 2024. The work being developed for exhibition will take the form of a series of sculptural and woven pieces, inspired by skeletal and muscular structures. Alongside the exhibition, and through the Market Place, he will develop an engagement programme to offer different access points for audiences to experience the work on show.

Michael Patrick, awarded £4,900 (Belfast)

Michael Patrick is an actor and writer with an impressive track record. With long-standing creative partner Oisín Kearney, Michael co-wrote and appeared in the stage production My Left Nut, later adapted for TV by BBC 3. Their play, The Alternative, won the Fishamble's Play for Ireland, and their play The Border Game, co-produced by Prime Cut, was staged at The Lyric Theatre as part of Belfast International Arts Festival in 2021.

With funding from the Arts Council, Michael proposes to work with Oisin Kearney to adapt Shakespeare’s Richard III for stage. Recently diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease, Michael will draw on his own experiences for this new adaptation.

Lennin Nelson McClure, awarded £2,875 (Belfast)

Lennin Nelson McClure is an actor and early career circus artist, who trained at the National Centre for Circus Arts. He specialises in cloudswing/loop, rope, chains, hula hoop and acrobalance. Recent performances in Northern Ireland have included work with Cahoots, Young at Art, Lumiere Productions and Big Telly. He has also had roles in Nicholas Hytner’s Bridge Theatre, London’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Pink Buckett III: Of Spirit- Queer Arts Festival, and tutors in circus, theatre and dance.

Funding from the Arts Council will be used to support the development of Lennin’s first solo show. The short outdoor circus show will be produced for World Space Week (October 2024) and explore themes of curiosity and wonder experienced by a little boy who journeys to the moon.

Ruaidhrí Maguire, awarded £5,000 (Mid-Ulster)

Ruaidhrí Maguire is an exciting ballet dancer and choreographer with an impressive practice history in European ballet. He is currently the youngest male principal dancer at the Baltic Opera Ballet in Poland and his recent work White Doves for Six Dance Collective premiered at the MAC, Belfast, in 2023.

Funding from the Arts Council will support research and development for a new work entitled A View from Mars. Working collaboratively with designer Conan McIvor, this piece will question stereotypes of both masculinity and what is traditionally associated with dance pieces derived from the classical genre.

Constance Craig-McGrath, awarded £2,023 (Newry, Mourne and Down)

Constance Craig-McGrath, based in Holywood, Co.Down, has 11 years’ experience working within the field of make-up and visual effects, for film, tv and private clients. To date, she has received many awards and accolades for her work including from the Irish Make-Up Awards, NI Make-up Artist of the Year and Winner of Special FX. Over the past five years she has delivered over 60 workshops teaching special effects make-up to young people.

Constance will use her funding from the Arts Council to develop new training workshops, teaching intricate and sophisticated prosthetic make-up techniques that will allow students to create injury detail and character effects.

Csilla Toldy, awarded £5,220 (Newry, Mourne and Down)

Now based in Rostrevor, CsillaToldy is a prize-winning writer and poet, originally from Czechia. Her short-stories, poetry and fiction writing have garnered much success, widely published in notable collections, journals and magazines.

Funding from the Arts Council will help support the creation of a new work in the form of prose poems that will relate to place as well as the metaphor of breath expanding out to the universal and human. Within the work, Csilla will explore themes of identity, the life of artists and social issues of poverty and migration.

Susannah Dickey, awarded £4,075 (Derry and Strabane)

Susannah Dickey, based in Derry~Londonderry, has been writing professionally for four years and in that time has published two novels and a collection of poetry, as well several poetry pamphlets and individual pieces of fiction and non-fiction that have been published in journals, and broadcast on the BBC. Her first novel, Tennis Lessons, was published in July 2020 to critical acclaim, and her second book, Common Decency was Waterstones’ Irish Book of the Month for August 2023.

Funding from the Arts Council will support the development of a new historical fiction novel. The novel will be centred on Grace Gifford, an Irish artist who was born in Dublin and raised as a Protestant, who converting to Catholicism after meeting Joseph Plunkett.