BERE islander Mary Sullivan has won a prestigious art award which earned her €10,000.

Mary was this week presented with the 2018 RDS Taylor Art Award for her BA work At Home, At War which was announced at the launch of the RDS Visual Art Awards Exhibition. 

Previoius winners included high profile names such as Harry Clarke, Seán Keating, and Louis Le Brocquy.

Mary is a graduate of the DIT Dublin School of Creative Arts, Sherkin Island, where she received a first-class honours BA in Visual Art. 

Her RDS Taylor Art Award winning installation is a video sculpture piece linking the repetitive nature of domestic chores to the drill and precision of military discipline.

She constructed a life-size military ‘look-out’ block house, which houses four video performances on four flat-screen televisions viewed through a peep hatch on each side. 

Mary recorded a series of performances in abandoned military sites on Bere Island, former home to a British navy base. Each task in the video works is undertaken with precision and care in an underground, windowless passageway. The scenes in the tunnel allude to suffocation and claustrophobia, as well as speaking back to Ireland’s colonial past and raising questions of the role of women in Irish society.