Una Sealy painter and Thomas Brezing, multidisciplinary artist and poet were the recipients of the Fingal County Council, Tyrone Guthrie Centre and Bealtaine Festival Residency Award 2022 and each undertook a month long residency in May 2022 at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in the beautiful, tranquil setting of Annaghmakerrig, County Monaghan. The residency provided an ideal environment for each of them to research and develop new work in response to the Bealtaine Festival theme of ‘Interdependence’.
Join Una and Thomas, who are both based in North County Dublin, for their conversation discussing their work, current projects and interests, and their month-long residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig.
Una Sealy is a Dublin based painter, and has been a Member of the Royal Hibernian Academy ( RHA) since 2010. In 2021 she was appointed as the inaugural Professor of Art at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI). She was a recipient (along with Thomas Brezing) of the 2022 Bealtaine/Fingal Arts/Tyrone Guthrie Centre award, where she worked on a series of paintings about pole-dancing. She has won several other awards including the Ireland-US Council/Irish Arts Review prize for portraiture at the RHA in 2011. She has held eleven solo exhibitions to date, and her work has been selected for many curated shows in Ireland and abroad. In 2019, she was one of ten artists invited by the Dept of Foreign Affairs to exhibit in China to mark 40 years of Ireland/China diplomatic relations. She has recently been commissioned to paint major portraits for Waterford County Council, Dublin City University and NUI Galway. She is a Fellow of Ballinglen Arts Foundation, and was Artist in Residence at the National Gallery of Ireland in 2018. She is tutor in drawing and painting at the RHA School, where she has developed a teaching module on Anatomy for Artists in association with RCSI. She was a judge on both series of RTE’s Painting the Nation in 2016 and 2017.
Thomas Brezing was born in Germany and moved to Ireland in the early 1990s. He is a multi-disciplinary artist and poet based in North County Dublin. In his 30-year art practice he has exhibited his work nationally and internationally in venues such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the RHA, Dublin, the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, Lapua Art Museum, Finland, and the Limerick City Gallery. To date he has published two hardback art books, The Art Of Failure Isn’t Hard To Master in 2011 in conjunction with Highlanes Municipal Art Gallery and Out Too Far (Wishing Too Many Things) as part of an Arts Council Bursary Award in 2017. In 2022 Scotus Press published his debut poetry collection Anvil Dust, for which he was awarded the John Richardson French Residency Award. He is currently working on his second collection and has an exhibition coming up this summer at Ardgillan Castle, Co. Dublin.