The resulting artworks highlight the myriad of ways each artist has approached the idea of the self-portrait and their own distinct experience of selfhood.
The Art Prize was open to submissions from artists over the age of 18, who work in sculpture, textiles, ceramics, glassware, jewellery and wood carving, excluding those who have had a solo exhibition in a public institution.
ARTISTS
Nicole Backlund explores her experience of motherhood through the material of ceramics. For Backlund, the transformation of clay into a ceramic artwork becomes a metaphor for the patience, dedication and bravery required in both motherhood and the life of an artist. These works touch on issues of gender, reproduction, social, and intergenerational justice.
Garance Bray incorporates her daily writing practice into her sculptural works. A native French speaker, Bray often translates her work into English. Shown in two parts, Google translate killed me includes a hanging structure where we find words embroidered from a poem by Bray. Behind, written onto a large canvas wall hanging, is the poem processed through Google translate and her corrected version. The work reveals Bray’s creative response to the automated translation programme and its effective erasure of the female gender and its replacement with the masculine.
Joseph Ijoyemi uses archival items and historic objects to explore questions of identity, heritage, cultural memory and restitution. Revival Boats is a fleet of origami boats created from pieces of metal plates removed from the hull of the Cutty Sark in 1963. Through the work the artist draws on the theme of revival to consider the experiences of second-generation migrants from Africa who chose to return to their ancestral land in order to rebuild and reconnect with their roots. For Ijoyemi, the boats, scratched with the words, ‘dream’ and ‘new leaders’, ‘serve as powerful symbols of resilience and determination, embodying the spirit of those who embark on this transformative return'.
Andia Coral Newton uses textiles, sound art and installation to explore interests including, the role of humans on the environment, our perception of history through images and the adaptability of sea-creatures. Hermit crabs and celestial phenomena are common motifs in her work, while her body is often a reference point. These details can be found in The Scavenger, a large digital knit tapestry on cotton depicting a creature that is part human part-hermit crab chimera on the seabed. For Newton, The Scavenger reflects her concerns around survival in the face of hostile environmental forces, forms adaptability, the home and shelter.
John Reyntiens’ stained-glass practice looks at traditional craftsman techniques through a new lens. In Two Worlds Come Together, Reyntiens re-created fragments of 15th century medieval glass found in the cellars of Coventry Cathedral and collaged them on top of an abstract design to create a piece that brings together the old and the new. Combining the traditional craft with this modern approach, the work is a self-portrait of an artist who has been both restoring old glass and creating new artworks for over twenty years. As Reyntiens says, ‘in order to preserve our past we have to look after our skills in the present'.
Ruth Richmond’s practice touches on the themes of nature, the landscape and family. Based in a small sheep farm in Suffolk, the artist locates her work, ideas and materials within these surroundings. Family diversity is comprised of a family of coppiced hazel wood stems, selected, cut and embellished by Richmond with chalk paint and burned with incised lines. The process of decorating these hazel stems or ‘poles’, as Richmond refers to them, is meditative even maternal and is about ‘depicting landscape, relationships, [and] time.’ There is no fixed way to display the work with the context for installation, be it inside a gallery or outside in the landscape, shifting the meaning of the work.
SaeRi Seo’s work Warped Good Child takes inspiration from the moon jar - a traditional form in Korean ceramics - to explore her painful experience growing up in a society that privileges men. The moon jar is a glazed white porcelain jar resembling a full moon that is created by joining two half bowl shapes. Made in the Josean Dynasty (1392-1897), SaeRi Seo reflects how they were exclusively created by men, with women perceived to bring bad luck. She responds to this belief from a personal perspective, as someone who has ‘internalised the idea that [she] had done something wrong by being born a girl,’ and who often felt compelled to be kind and polite. To express this experience, SaeRi Seo has taken the moon jar as a conceptual and formal reference point, and both symbolically and physically exploded it apart. Growing inside are iris flowers, a symbol of hope.
Iman Sidonie-Samuels uses archival materials to trace histories that are both material and personal. 3049 Calls, 19,401 Minutes reflects her interest in the act of collecting as well as in finding patterns between data, text and images. The work is composed of 81 monthly phone bills taken from her grandmother’s house in St Lucia between 1995-2015. Stitched together, the artwork documents telecommunication between England and St Lucia, where Sidonie-Samuels is from. Through the work Sidonie-Samuels opens up an archive of personal memories and relationships and invites you into an engagement with her culture and the wider Caribbean diaspora.
Megan Sharples works across textiles, film, installation and poetry to explore the value of craft and the act of making by hand as a method of self-care, introspection and connection. They often use soft natural fabrics, traditional techniques and references to the domestic to evoke a sense of comfort and familiarity and create a safe space to discuss difficult, emotional topics. Portrait of Self is created from tufted lilac wool on a hand-knitted and hand-felted wool background with a grid of stitched lines. The simplified forms create a caricature of the artist’s appearance, depicting a more ambiguous being, and allowing Sharples to question gender stereotypes and find a space in-between.
Sam Sherborne, both an artist and blacksmith, creates autobiographical sculptures as a way to process memories and concerns. Though the subject matter is often serious there is an added layer of humour. The work on display in the exhibition is in two parts. In Run for it, a figure - a version of Sherborne’s adult self – ‘is shown running and escaping from the clutches of a bizarre childhood household.’ The second part, Self-Portrait shows an inner figure, ‘a nervous entity, wrestling with the controls’, within a larger figure representing Sherborne’s ‘apparently confident outer self'.
Themoulla Sofroniou works across three areas - box sculptures, artist books and plastic and textile botanical sculptures. The box sculptures, of significance here, are created from discarded and recycled objects and paraphernalia as portraits of people. They often have lids and open up like a book to reveal a carefully lit interior world. The two box sculptures on display - 1970’s Greek in London No.1 and 1970’s Greeks in London No. 2 - are autobiographical and are based on the artist’s struggle to adapt to life away from the Mediterranean after moving to London.
Zhilin Xu draws on her experience growing up between British and Chinese cultures to explore the in-between space of cultural belonging. Her practice moves across film, sculpture, and drawing whilst emphasing positive ideas of the decorative and the feminine, aligning this with forms of storytelling. Two of the artworks on display, The Light We Hold and Savoir have acted as props for her films which follow the emotional struggles of characters who are intercultural travellers. While Out, In, Safely references a Chinese greeting used when loved-ones are traveling, and incorporates the personal QR codes that enabled Zhilin to travel between China and the UK during the pandemic. The portrait, for Zhilin Xu, ‘is a journey that departs from the experience of an East Asian woman'.
JUDGING PANEL
Chair: Nancy Durrant, Culture Editor, Evening Standard
Ben Cobb, ES Magazine Editor, Evening Standard
Aowen Jin, artist
Frédéric Malle, author and “editeur de parfum”
Helen Nisbet, CEO and Artistic Director, Cromwell Place
Bisila Noha, artist
