Current Winner
Sebastian Thomas MRSS
“I’m hugely excited to be offered the residency at Carraig-na-gCat. I can’t wait to spend a month in the beautifully rugged and austere landscape of the Atlantic Coast. I will welcome the time and space away from my busy life as a freelance art technician and fabricator to properly focus on developing my practice and taking forward new ideas. I hope that through being away from my studio and all the equipment heavy processes that I usually rely upon, I’ll be able to take the time to fundamentally reevaluate my practice and think about where I want to take it. I look forward to finding inspiration from the immediate landscape of West Cork and discovering new materials, ways of working and developing a fresh body of work.”
My practice centres on the process of assemblage and encompasses sculpture, installation, painting and collage. I construct physical landscapes, populated with semi-fictional objects and characters as a means with which to explore the possibilities of transformation inherent in both material and the human body.
Things, though they seem concrete, always have the potential to change. They can melt, be deconstructed, degrade, lose their functions or become imbued with a new significance through an altered context. To create my work, I use simple materials and found objects; the left-overs, off cuts and overlooked things. My recent sculptures explore this though the parallel transformative qualities of recycled metal and clay in processes of casting and modelling, in an attempt to capture both the physicality of the material and the labour of our bodies.
A DYCP grant in 2021 helped me achieve a step change within my practice; by undertaking residencies to learn the basics of metal casting, ceramics and blacksmithing, and supporting me to build my own mini furnace from scratch. This has allowed me to develop unique casting processes as I can control and experiment with all aspects of casting metal from mould making to pouring and finishing.
Recent exhibition highlights include Realm of Dusk, 571 Gallery, Reading, UK, 2024; A New Face in Hell, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Edinburgh, UK, 2023; A Tally of Distempered Parts, ASC Gallery, London, UK, 2023; Golem, Lot Projects, London, UK, 2022; The Necker, APT Gallery, London, UK, 2021; The Weather Garden, The Towner, Eastbourne, UK, 2019; Wild Service, Kingsgate Project Space, London, UK, 2019 and Troglodyte Antiphon, Intercession Gallery, Northampton, UK, 2019.