The 2025 Debi O'Hehir bursaries have been awarded to artists Renèe Helèna Browne and Jasper McKinney.
The Tyrone Guthrie Centre is pleased to announce that the Debi O’Hehir 2025 bursaries are being awarded to artists Renèe Helèna Browne and Jasper McKinney. These artists are invited to spend a fortnight at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre later in 2025 where their stay in Annaghmakerrig House will be fully catered, and a visual arts or the print studio will be their dedicated workspace. Thank you to the generosity of Debi and her family who make this award possible and we're looking forward to welcoming these artists to Annaghmakerrig.
Renèe Helèna Browne is an Irish artist working across film, drawing and spoken word. Present in Browne’s work are lived experiences of rurality, labour and religion growing up in the North West of Ireland. They unravel the legacies of these experiences as they pass through storytelling and the gendered body. This is a practice of portraiture, motivated by jealousy, desire, and idolisation. At stake in this process are notions of utopia and failure, embedded in troubled discourses of the ‘homeland’ and the nuclear family’s networks of care and communing. Although bound up in loss, both works ‘Sanctus!’ (2024) and ‘Daddy’s Boy’ (2020) are Browne’s own forms of world building through film. Here they surface their own uncertainties about belonging to form vernacular studies of intimacy and personhood that run along both mythic and personal lines. This is a continuous practising of transformation and renewal, involving the intractable renegotiating of identification, and a hopeful unfolding of what it means to be vulnerably entangled in the world.
Browne has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2025), the Edinburgh Art Festival 2024 co-commissioned with the University of Edinburgh Art Collection, Bahia Independent Film Festival Brazil, Project Arts Centre with aemi and Cinenova, Freelands Foundation, Talbot Rice Gallery, Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, LUX Scotland, David Dale Gallery at P/////AKT Amsterdam, the European Media Art Festival No. 34, TULCA Visual Art Festival, bff/Docs Ireland, and Rua das Gaivotas, Lisbon. They were awarded the Salzburger Kunstverein Sunset Kino Award 2021 for excellence in contemporary film. Browne’s work is represented in public collections of The Arts Council and the University of Edinburgh Art Collection.
Jasper McKinney MBE is an established practising artist based in Ireland and France making paintings, drawings, digital drawings and sculpture. McKinney studied at Brighton College of Art and Slade School of Fine Art, London, awarded an MBE in the 2013. He shows artwork internationally which reflects his experiences and imagination, along with his excitement and optimism for life. His pieces in the House of Lords and other collections demonstrate inspiration from a range of sources including historical research, landscape, architecture and cultural references. The work is in a process of transition as McKinney takes on new challenges. Recent projects have included a presentation of 28 works in South West France, Digital Art Projects in Mexico, Scotland and Ireland. Participation in the Ukraine Fundraising Exhibition at the Engine Room Gallery and a Commission of Paintings working in collaboration with the Poet Moyra Donaldson. In 2019 he completed a major project representing people living with a physical disability ”Get to Know Me” for SHSCT.
He was appointed as one of three Creative Directors leading the re- design of the new Ulster Bank notes.
The works share a distinct creative journey allowing the outcome to surprise and challenge viewers who are invited to investigate their response to the visual language and references included.
About the Debi O'Hehir Bursaries
The Tyrone Guthrie Centre has been the beneficiary of a legacy made by artist and regular resident, Debi O'Hehir (1962-2015). Thanks to Debi’s and her family’s generosity, we are able offer bursaries to visual artists in the Island’s northern counties.
Bursaries in general
We do our utmost, in the first instance, to make space for all professional artists and creatives on the island of Ireland. Following on from our remit to provide space for artists on the island of Ireland, we are always pleased to welcome overseas and international residents. To this end, we continually seek strategic partnerships with local, national, and international arts organizations or individuals to create endowed opportunities to The Tyrone Guthrie Centre. We are deeply committed to ensuring full accessibility and inclusion, and many of our bursaries are specifically focused on making space and warmly welcoming our creative colleagues from all communities, and those who might not otherwise be able to take up a residency with us.
If you would like to partner with us to endow a bursary opportunity, please contact The Director, director@tyroneguthrie.ie
All bursary opportunities to The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, whether funded through us, partnering organisation/s or individual/s, are assessed by peer panel with expertise in the specific area that the bursary focuses on.
All bursary holders must take up their residencies with us within 12 months of receipt of their award. Failure to do so will mean that the bursary opportunity will be returned to the awarding organisation for redistribution.
