This year’s ARTWORKS considers climate change and how we care for our planet.

Selected Artists: Chloe Brenan, Amber Broughton, Nuala Clarke, Helena Gorey, Paul Hallahan, Ramon Kassam, Vera Klute, Ruth Le Gear in collaboration with Kaitlin Bryson, Christine Mackey, Jonathan Mayhew, Stefana McClure, Siobhan McDonald, Sorca O'Farrell, Kiera O'Toole, Magnhild Opdøl, Helen Robbins, Ciara Roche, Emma Roche, Bernadette Tuite, Shipsides and Beggs Projects and Lee Welch.

The open call invited artists to submit work that responds to the theme of climate and our natural environment. Gathering a diverse selection of ideas from artists working nationally and internationally, The Sky is Blue presents work in film, painting, sculpture, new media and photography. ARTWORKS 2020 celebrates contemporary visual art and its potential to engage a critical and heightening awareness of environmental change.

ARTWORKS 2020 was selected by Carlow Arts Festival Director Jo Mangan, VISUAL Artistic Director and CEO Emma Lucy O' Brien and New York based artist and activist Katie Holten.

This years awards

The Artworks Award of €3000, presented for the most outstanding work in any medium went to Helena Gorey for the paintings Blue Horizon and Black Horizon, a meditation in paint on light and the absence of light.

The Eigse Graduate prize of €1000 was awarded to Ciara Roche for the painting Study no 5. Made during lockdown of the artists bedroom filled with sunlight and shadows.The artist considers how small our individual worlds became.

The judges said: These works respond to the moment that we find ourselves in, in really sensitive ways, the light and the dark, the ways our world changed this year as we coped with isolation, lockdown and a planet under pressure.

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Please contact Catherine Byrne at exhibitions@visualcarlow.ie for further information and images.

ARTWORKS is SLICE #4 of Carlow Arts Festival's #SLICES programme for 2020. The festival is creating novel ways to share experiences over the coming months. The special online and digital festival edition will include 7 Slices of projects and events that they believe will connect audiences and artists… from a distance, and will include newly commissioned work, Artworks visual art exhibition, VR cinema and exciting new interactive Digitally Native projects and the live one hour special.

ARTWORKS 2020 – The Sky is Blue is part of a wider programme of exhibitions and events at VISUAL where artists consider climate change and our natural environment.