Studios of Sanctuary is Sample-Studios’ multi award-winning training and mentorship programme for artists from an asylum seeker, refugee or migrant background. The programme was successfully piloted from 2021-23 with the support of the Cork Arts Fund and has continued in 2024 with support from Rethink Ireland. The programme offers eight artists from asylum seeker, refugee and migrant backgrounds a programme of professional development training, one-to-one expert mentorship, a peer network, access to facilities, a monthly bursary and funding support to deliver community events.

Tetiana Milshyna is an artist and art teacher from Kyiv, Ukraine where she had been living and working prior to the outbreak of war in February 2022. She fled her home in Ukraine bringing with her over 200 of her watercolours to Cork City. Tetiana taught watercolour painting in an art school for adults, facilitated workshops and worked as a freelance artist and illustrator in Kyiv. Her paintings have been reproduced as posters and postcards in Ukraine. She has had solo exhibitions in Kinsale Library, The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion, The Address Hotel and most recently, Cnoc Bui in Union Hall. Her paintings are held in private collections in European countries including Ukraine, Ireland, France and Spain. She is the recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award which has funded her creation of a series of watercolour lighthouses of Ireland.

Being a watercolour landscape artist, based in Cork, her practice is focused on the surrounding seascapes, lighthouses, countryside scenes, historical and archeological heritage. Her works include plein air and studio watercolours of Munster seascapes and countryside landscapes, especially of county Cork and also some works of different places in nearby counties. Her latest body of work ‘Between Sea and Light’ consists of 20 paintings of Irish lighthouses up to now, done in watercolour and gouache both in studio and plein air. Her urban Cork body of work consists of several Cork City scenes such as St. Lukes Cross, Blackpool Street, St. Patrick Hill, Blackrock pier. She also has special interest in Prehistoric and Medieval Irish heritage, such as stone circles, stone rows, ogham stones, castles, churches and monastery ruins. Having exhibited as part of a group exhibition during STAMP Festival in Triskel Arts Centre, Tetiana was inspired by the space.

She will exhibit a series of Cork scenes while carrying out a residency in Triskel Sample Project Space in January which will enable her to create a new body of work exploring urban and rural surrounding scenes.

Triskel Sample Project Space is a new partnership between Triskel and Sample-Studios that will provide a visual arts project space for artists, especially emerging and mid-career artists, to test ideas and to develop new work that can be seen by the public. This offers tangible career development and audience engagement opportunities to artists on their ‘home turf’ where they have a safe space to develop new ideas, within which risk-taking is possible.

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