Tag: art

Northumbria People’s Show Art Competition Results In Tie

By on 23rd February 2016in Lifestyle

The most popular artwork at The People’s Show 2016 at Northumbria’s University Gallery resulted in a double winner, after a tie in public votes…

The People’s Show – one of the North East’s most celebrated open competitions for artists – returned to Northumbria last month with a £5,000 prize named after the late painter Norman Cornish.

There was also a £250 cash prize for the artwork which proved most popular with visitors. After more than 200 votes from the public, two artists found themselves with the exact same number of votes, and will now share the prize. The winners were artists Deryck Simpson with Fun on Longsands (acrylic on board) and Trevor Watson with Ladies Luncheon (watercolour).

Professor Keith McIntyre, Head of Arts at Northumbria, said: “We are delighted that 215 votes were cast by visitors to the People’s Show. After counting, there was a tie for 1st place so it seemed only fair to split the prize of £250.”

Held at the University Gallery at City Campus, the People’s Show is designed to foster the creative talent of the region, and is open to amateur and professional artists based in the region. Any medium of art can be entered as long as the subject-matter is people. This year’s exhibition took place last month, and featured the work of more than 30 artists from the region. Each year, the most significant single piece of work from the show is chosen by a judging panel, with the 2016 winner receiving the £5,000 Norman Cornish Art Prize. This year, the panel, consisting of Northumbria’s Head of Department for Arts, Professor Keith McIntyre, Professor Jean Brown, artist Helen Baker, and former People’s Show winner Carly Rybak, selected a painting by artist Lizzie Rowe entitled Sixty as the winner.

 

Professor McIntyre added: “We were delighted to host the People’s Show once again in the Northumbria University Gallery. There is an extraordinary spirit and energy to this exhibition, profiling the work of 33 artists from across the region.”

Northumbria has a very strong relationship with the family of the late artist Norman Cornish, with the University housing a permanent collection of his work and engaging in a variety of activities to preserve his legacy. His family kindly allowed his name to be used alongside the People’s Show prize to become the Norman Cornish Art Prize at this year’s exhibition. The news follows recent announcements about ongoing plans for the Cornish legacy involving Northumbria University and Spennymoor Town Council. The Coming Home exhibition will see a permanent collection of the artist’s work on display at Spennymoor Town Hall in the new Norman Cornish Room. For more information about this exhibition, click here.

To find out more about the University Gallery, visit www.gn.northumbria.ac.uk.

£20,000 Art Prize Open For Applications

By on 20th February 2016in In & Around

Student artists from across the UK can now apply for one of the UK’s most generous arts prizes…

 

The Woon Foundation Prize, jointly hosted by Northumbria University, Newcastle, and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, offers an exceptional opportunity for final year undergraduate fine art and sculpture students.

The first prize is £20,000 cash and a 12-month studio space based in the Woon Tai Jee studio at BALTIC 39 in Newcastle city centre. The year-long fellowship includes mentoring from staff from both institutions and a final exhibition with catalogue at the end of the Fellowship. There are also two generous runner-up prizes of £9,000 and £6,000, plus a further £5,000 discretionary award.

The Prize is fee-free, and applications can be made via www.woonprize.co.uk up until 31st March 2016. The shortlisted artists will be selected by a panel of judges including Laurence Sillars, BALTIC Chief Curator, Christine Borland, Turner Prize-nominated artist and BALTIC Professor at Northumbria University, and Karen MacKinnon, Curator and Director, Artes Mundi.

Up to 12 artists will be shortlisted from the open submission for an exhibition at BALTIC’s project space at BALTIC 39 in summer 2016, with a solo exhibition concluding the Fellowship at Northumbria’s Gallery North.

Northumbria and BALTIC jointly award and present the The Woon Foundation Prize for Painting and Sculpture as an important part of the successful strategic partnership between the two organisations. Now in its fourth year, the Prize is open to all UK undergraduate Fine Art students who are in their final year of study, graduating in summer 2016.

The £40,000 prize fund is generously donated by The Woon Foundation. One of its trustees, Mr Wee Teng Woon, studied law at Northumbria and is passionate about creating opportunities for new and emerging artists.

Professor Borland said: “On behalf of the judging panel, we are really excited to begin to receive the applications for this year’s Woon Foundation Prize. The generous nature of this prize is unique in all respects; for the selected Woon Fellow, to receive not only a studio and a one person show with a catalogue, but the support of the community of artists, students, and academics at BALTIC 39 in the heart of Newcastle.

For the other prize winners, the freedom to spend their prizes however they choose; on travel, materials, or to pay the studio rent, is surely a game changer. Association with the Prize, and an exhibition at BALTIC 39 will, I’m certain, be a welcome addition on any young artist’s CV.”

Sarah Munro, BALTIC Director added: “BALTIC is absolutely delighted and proud to be a key partner in the Woon Foundation Prize. From the remarkable generosity of the prizes to the chance for young artists to have their work seen by an esteemed panel of artists and curators, this is the absolute must-consider prize for undergraduate fine art students in the UK.

“We are proud that BALTIC’s curatorial staff form part of the judging panel each year, and the shortlist exhibition is presented in BALTIC’s project space at BALTIC 39. Crucially, the Woon Foundation Prize is one of the continuing ways BALTIC supports talent development of artists in their formative years. We hope it also sees all shortlisted finalists engage in the burgeoning artistic community here in the North East.”

The prize was launched in 2012, and the inaugural winner was artist Holly Hendry, who completed her Fellowship in September 2014. The next Fellow was Ramona Zoladek, who held the Fellowship until September 2015. The current Fellow is Kayt Hughes, who recently met Mr Woon when he visited the UK in January.

Mr Woon said: “The Woon Foundation is delighted that applications are open for the Woon Art and Sculpture Prize 2016. We look forward to seeing the work of this year’s shortlisted applicants, and encourage you to take part.”

The Woon Foundation Prize 2016 is open for applications until 31st March 2016. For full terms and conditions, and to enter, visit www.woonprize.co.uk.

Northumbria Graduate Invited To Exhibit At Prestigious Exhibition

By on 9th February 2016in Entertainment

Artist Joanna Hutton has been invited to exhibit at a prestigious European exhibition less than a year after graduating from Northumbria University, Newcastle…

A graduate of the BxNU Master of Fine Art (MFA) course, delivered in partnership with BALTIC Centre of Contemporary Art, Joanna will exhibit at EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art.

Entitled Still (the) Barbarians, the exhibition opens on Saturday 16th April 2016, and has been curated by Koyo Kouoh, the founding artistic director of RAW Material Company, Dakar, and the curator of 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London and New York. Artists’ projects were selected through an open and invited call for proposals, and exhibitions will take place at Limerick City Gallery of Art, Cleeve’s Condensed Milk Factory and various locations across Limerick. Since its foundation in 1977, EVA International has worked with some of the world’s leading artists and curators, bringing outstanding exhibitions to audiences on the west coast of Ireland.

Joanna said: “I am thrilled to have been invited to participate in the 2016 edition of EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial titled Still (the) Barbarians. I applied for the opportunity in June straight after completing my MFA at BxNU proposing the work I made for my final show. It is a great opportunity for me to be involved in such a prestigious event, and feel privileged to have been selected.”

Developed in partnership with BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Northumbria’s two-year MFA course offers ambitious artists the opportunity to participate in a unique postgraduate degree programme, centred on the vibrant and dynamic studio culture of the BxNU Institute of Contemporary Art at BALTIC 39 in Newcastle’s city centre. The institute, directed by the BALTIC Professor and Turner Prize-nominated artist Christine Borland, houses a network of internationally active artists, academics and curators who provide world-class teaching and mentorship in fine art practice and research.

Professor Christine Borland, Turner Prize-nominated artist and Northumbria’s BALTIC professor, teaches on the BxNU MFA. She said: “We are delighted to see alumni from the our first graduating BxNU MFA cohort, Joanna Hutton’s name amongst the stellar list of artists participating in this year’s EVA International.

“Joanna will exhibit her piece from the graduating exhibition ‘Milkilling’ held in the project space at BALTIC 39 last summer. We look forward to following Joanna’s career and we’re sure she will be the first of many of our graduates to go on to international art world acclaim.”

Joanna is currently Associate Fellow at Paper Studio Northumbria, (PSN) a unique facility for the research, teaching and scholarship of paper in relation to fine art, conservation and archiving, as well as for the practice of papermaking.

Northumbria offers a range of courses in the Arts, and was rated in the UK Top 10 for research power in the Research Excellence Framework 2014. For more information about studying Arts courses at Northumbria go to: www.northumbria.ac.uk/arts.

American Road Trip Exhibition To Open At Durham Art Gallery

By on 20th January 2016in Entertainment

Visitors to Durham Art Gallery are to be taken on road trip across America as the North East’s Cath Campbell unveils her new exhibition…

 

The artist, who studied fine art at Newcastle University, has seen her work displayed across the world.

But this January, her latest show, Canary Yellow With Royal Blue, will arrive in Durham, leading film fans on a dreamlike journey that follows in the footsteps of beat poets like Jack Kerouac.

“The phrase canary yellow with royal blue is part of a description of the location of the Six Gallery, San Francisco, which in 1955 hosted a poetry reading by a group of radical West Coast writers, who later became known as the Beat Generation,” said Cath, from Newcastle, whose exhibition includes two collections of films, projected onto free-standing screens.

“Each film is about an individual state, and is a collage of clips from amateur travel videos found on YouTube. The dialogue in each clip is translated by Google automatic captions, and the resulting subtitles are full of slight mistranslations that provide a disquieting and poetic quality to the narrative.”

Canary Yellow With Royal Blue, which is supported by Arts Council England, runs from 23rd January until 31st March 2016.

Normal admission charges – of £4.20 for adults, £3.15 for concessions, £2.10 for 4 to 16-year-olds and free for children under four years – apply.

Discovery Museum To Exhibit Human Rights Portraits

By on 10th January 2016in Entertainment

An exhibition of oil paintings by Newcastle-based artist Paul Piercy is to cast light on some of the world’s most dedicated human rights campaigners…

The Black Portraits opens at Discovery Museum on Saturday 16th January, telling the stories of 17 people from around the world who were imprisoned – or died – in pursuit of justice and liberty. Six paintings are to be shown for the first time.

Piercy’s subjects are the extraordinary people who not only dreamed of the freedoms and equalities we take for granted in the UK, but strove towards them peacefully.

Their faces are painted in thick, black impasto, an aesthetic that took on a profound symbolic meaning for the artist. He explains: “In 2010, I saw that Liu Xiaobo had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His story moved me, and I wanted to tell everyone I could about it through my painting. I quickly put a colourful backdrop together, but with my ‘sitter’ absent, I decided to use thick black paint for his face, so that it would catch the light and show his features.

“I discovered many, many other brave human rights activists in different parts of the world, and became moved to tell their stories too. It became apparent that seeing them all with faces in black impasto made a powerful statement about their death or imprisonment, so that’s how I continued.”

The most prominent global figure in the exhibition is Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. She spent 15 years under house arrest by order of the country’s military junta before her release in 2010. Aung San Suu Kyi is now President of the National League for Democracy.

Some of those depicted, like Oleg Bebenin, paid the ultimate price for their activism. A campaigner for Belarusian presidential hopeful Andrei Sannikov, Bebenin was found hanged in suspicious circumstances in 2010. Sannikov – himself a political prisoner – also features in Bebenin’s portrait, and will host a free talk and film screening at Discovery Museum on Saturday 9th April.

Another, Ali Abdulemam, became known as the ‘Bahraini Blogger’ after founding a pro-democracy website in the late 90s. Accused of trying to subvert the country’s regime, he went into hiding for two years before emerging in 2013. He has now been granted political asylum in the United Kingdom and visits Discovery Museum to give a free talk about his story on Saturday 26th March.

Alongside The Black Portraits are five paintings which show full-colour likenesses of their subjects. The additional depictions of Binayak Sen, Lapiro de Mbanga, Ali Abdulemam, Andrei Sannikov and Guillermo Farinas were created after their respective releases from prison.

The exhibition runs from Saturday 16th January until Sunday 17th April, and is supported by a programme of public events, including talks and film screenings.

Discovery Museum is free to enter, and open seven days a week. Please see www.discoverymuseum.org.uk for further details and opening hours.

For more information on The Black Portraits project, visit: www.theblackportraits.org.

Newcastle’s Toffee Factory To Host Return Of The Illuminarium

By on 8th December 2015in Entertainment, Events, What's On?

Newcastle’s Toffee Factory is set to play host to the wonderful world of nocturnal insects this weekend…

The Illuminarium is an ambitious, digital moving image installation by artists Chloe Rodham and Tim Lozinski, which dazzled audiences when it launched at Queens Hall in Hexham in October.

If you weren’t lucky enough to see it there, you’ll now have a second chance as the installation comes to the Toffee Factory on Newcastle’s Quayside, from 10th until 12th December. Entrance to The Illuminarium is free and runs from 4pm until 8pm.

Described as an Alice In Wonderland-esque experience, the installation will be housed outside in a tent-like structure, and promises to take visitors on a trip through the life cycle of one of the world’s most mysterious creatures: the moth.

With the use of luminous sculptures, multiple projections, sound and stop-motion animation, the beautifully crafted models are sure to enchant and engage audiences.

Emerging Northumberland-based artist Chloe Rodham, who specialises in combining traditional model-making with digital creative processes, explains: “Illuminarium was really well received in Hexham, and we hope as many people as possible will take the opportunity to come and see it at the Toffee Factory over this weekend in December.”

“With glowing fibre-optic caterpillars and cocoon shaped lanterns, our exhibition reveals a projected stop-motion animation of moths.  It will be different from the one that was shown in Hexham, and we’re excited to see what audiences will think of it.”

There will be also be the chance to gather insight into how the artwork was created, as the artists will be giving a talk from 4pm until 5pm on Saturday. For more information, or to book a free ticket, visit www.the-illuminarium.co.uk.

The Illuminarium is supported by public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England and Creative Space Management.

ADVERTISERS