News: ACW alumni Laura Smith is the winner of Kinsale Arts Festival Now Wakes the Sea 2014

Kinsale Arts Festival has announced the winner of Now Wakes the Sea 2014, the annual open submission exhibition, as visual artist Laura Smith. The emerging artist exhibition tookplace at Temperance Hall in the centre of Kinsale, and ran until 28 September.Laura Smith will receive a solo show at the CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery, to run concurrently with the 2015 festival. Her submission ‘The Alternative is..’. builds a historical reconstruction of Radio City through a combination of interviews, on-site footage, archive materials and photographs asking the viewer to consider the utopian possibilities embodied by this removed society.

The Alternative is… is a two-channel HD video which focuses on the formation of the pirate radio station Radio City at Shivering Sands WWII anti-airfield forts on the Thames estuary. This piece explores a moment in history when a section of society took control over its channels of information by radically refusing to operate within the legal boundaries.

Smith is a graduate from NCAD MA Art in the Contemporary World where she received a first class honours. Recent shows include Misery Hill K.o.c/Mabos building, Dublin, Radio Joinery, The Joinery, Dublin 7, EVA – After the Future, Limerick, Orchestral Osmosis, D.I.T School of Music, Chatham row, Dublin 2.Laura Smith was chosen from nine selected emerging visual artists by an international selection panel including artist Kathy Prendergast, Ingrid Swenson (PEER UK), Helen Carey (Firestation Artist Studios) and Trish Brennan (Head of Fine Art and Applied Art, CIT Crawford College of Art and Design). They were very impressed by the high quality of the selected nine visual artists and were unanimous in their final decision.The nine selected artists were chosen for their questioning approach, and enquiry into the medium and expression of visual art today. The selected artists for 2014 are Collette Egan, Elizabeth Lyne, Joan Sugre, Laura Smith, Luke Sisk, Mandy Williams, Miriam O’Connor, Rita O’Driscoll, Sean Guinan. kinsaleartsfestival.com