Cairde Sligo Arts Festival’s fifth annual open submission exhibition, Cairde Visual, is now accepting submissions from visual artists. The submission forms are available at front of house at The Model or can be downloaded here. Submissions will be accepted up to Sunday June 10th. Cairde Visual will take place at the Model in Sligo from Wednesday the 11th- of July to Sunday 19th August 2018.
Image: Untitled, Anna Spearman 2017. Anna Spearman won the Model Cara Award during Cairde Visual 2017
2018 sees the return of The Model Cara Award, The Hamilton Gallery Award, and the Cosgrave’s Delicatessen Award. Introduced in 2017, the Cosgrave’s Delicatessen Award offers a €500 cash prize to the selected artist. Helen Merrigan Colfer won the inaugural Cosgrave’s Delicatessen Award in 2017.
The Hamilton Gallery, a pioneering contemporary art gallery in the heart of Sligo, offers the winner a solo exhibition in the gallery’s calendar of exhibitions in 2018. Clive Bright was the recipient of this award in 2016 and Daniel Chester was the recipient in 2017.
Recipients of the Model Cara award – a short-term residency in The Model’s artist studio – to date have been Helen Blake in 2015 and both Daniel Chester and Selma Makela in 2016, and Anna Spearman in 2017.
A significant, international open submission exhibition for the North West, Cairde Visual was established in 2013, by a group of Sligo based artists together with Cairde Sligo Arts Festival. The first annual submission took place in The Hyde Bridge Gallery in 2014. The move of Cairde Visual to The Model for 2017 was an exciting development for all concerned. The fourth annual exhibition took place at The Model in 2017 and boasted over 100 artworks from local, national and international artists, featuring a great diversity of media.
The exhibition has, in a short space of time, become a much-anticipated feature in the arts festival’s programme and in the cultural calendar of the region, not to mention an increasingly important fixture for artists all over Ireland and abroad.