EMERGENCE Visual Art Award Winner 2025

From Wexford Arts Centre.
1 December 2025.

Wexford County Council Arts Department and Wexford Arts Centre, in partnership with South East Technological University, are pleased to announce Marie Farrington as the recipient of the EMERGENCE Visual Art Award 2025.  As a joint initiative between the organizations, the award’s aim is to support visual artists with the development and promotion of their practice. Presented biannually, the award has a monetary value of €15,000 and includes mentorship support over the award cycle to the value of €2,000 and a solo exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre. In addition, the artist has the opportunity to engage with the Art Campus of South East Technological University and avail of practical resources for a period of time.

Marie Farrington’s practice reflects on the act of making through geological and archaeological lenses. Using casting, carving and other sculptural processes, she engages with memory through situated encounters with landscape and architecture. Dust, sand, wax, anthracite, plaster, ink and volcanic matter converge within the installations, evoking a spectral presence through unfixed or provisional elements. Making reference to field sampling, built heritage, and histories of display, the staged arrangements often consist of flat pictorial planes that suggest an act of framing. Underpinned by a consideration of surface as a point of intense contact between the history and future of an object, the works become entangled with and contingent on the sites of their display, reflecting on the conditions of their own visibility.

For the EMERGENCE Award, Farrington will produce a new body of work driven by research into geological and archaeological imaginings of gaps, openings, and thresholds. The work will put forward a hybrid practice of ‘Theatre/Archaeology,’ investigating symmetries between staged presentations and archaeological fieldwork via their shared interest in memory, the fragment, trace, and assemblage. Thinking across and between sites, Farrington will use the sculptural motif of the diagonal line to articulate a relational and collaborative stance, asking what it means to temporarily ‘lean’ against contexts, communities, and histories.

The artist will also work collaboratively with students of the Arts Campus of South East Technological University on a series of casting workshops for the students, producing a collaborative set of sculptural excavation tools which can be activated and handled by publics in the gallery, offering possibilities for interactivity.

Marie Farrington holds a three-year Membership Studio at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin. As part of her cross-site project Diagonal Acts, she recently presented solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Aughrim and The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, curated by Kate Strain (2025), with a forthcoming solo exhibition at Commonage Projects, London (2026). Her work is held in the permanent collections of The Arts Council of Ireland, Trinity Centre for the Environment, and the OPW Irish State Art Collection. Marie is supported by The Arts Council of Ireland through the Visual Arts Bursary and Project Awards. The EMERGENCE Visual Art Award is supported by the Arts Council.

Diagonal Acts – Act 2, 2025, installation view – The Dock (Carrick-on-Shannon). Photograph: Ros Kavanagh.