Art News: Turner Prize shortlist and Edinburgh Art Festival Commissions revealed

Article by News Team | 07 May 2014

TURNER PRIZE 2014 SHORTLIST ANNOUNCED
This year's Turner Prize shortlist, announced this week, is once again replete with Scottish-based artists, proving yet again that Scotland, and in particular Glasgow, remain at the cutting edge of contemporary art practice. The shortlisted artists are Dublin-born, Glasgow-based filmmaker Duncan Campbell; Ottawa-born, Glasgow-based Ciara Phillips, who creates site-specific installations and exhibitions using screenprints, textiles, photographs and wall paintings; Welsh-born, London-based multimedia artist James Richards; and narrative installation artist Tris Vonna-Michell, who splits her time between Southend and Stockholm. Both Campbell and Richards were nominated for work presented at the Venice Biennale. 

Duncan Campbell: Chris Marker and Alain Resnais ‘Les Statues meurent aussi’ (1953) 
Installation view ‘Scotland + Venice 2013: Sworn / Campbell / Tompkins’Courtesy of Communauteì Africaine de Culture. Photo by Ruth Clark

Each of the selected artists creates multi-sensory, immersive artwork constructed from disparate, pre-existing elements. Another approach each of these artists has in common is their ability to draw on their own personal and family history for inspiration, creating works that engage in a dialogue with the past that is both practical, psychological and geographical, while remaining utterly contemporary. The artists will each begin work on a new piece or installation for the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, which runs from 30 September to 1 Decemeber, when the winner of the £25,000 prize is announced.

We spoke exclusively to Kitty Anderson of Glasgow's Common Guild gallery, curators of Campbell's Scotland + Venice diplay, to give us her thoughts on this year's list. "I am delighted that Duncan Campbell has been nominated for his work It for Others, which was commissioned by The Common Guild for Scotland + Venice 2013," she says. "It is an incredible work that is reflective of Campbell's rich and immersive practice, which addresses a wide range of social and political issues and a wealth of cultural references."

Asked her thoughts about Glasgow-based artists' frequent appearances on the Turner shortlists, Anderson replies: "Glasgow is an amazing city to live and work in and the combination of a great art school, cheap rent and high level of critical debate attracts a wide range of talented and committed artists from a variety of different disciplines." For her, 2014's list is "a really interesting shortlist, and it is fantastic that Glasgow is so well represented."

EDINBURGH ART FESTIVAL COMMISSIONS UNVEILED
Founded in 2004, the Edinburgh Art Festival will be celebrating a decade as the UK's largest annual celebration of visual art, with over a quarter of a million visitors last year, running in parallel with the Edinburgh International Festival and Fringe from 31 July to 31 August. One of the cornerstones of the festival is its series of comissioned works, the details of which were revealed today.

Yann Seznec, Currents (2014), courtesy of the artist and Edinburgh Art Festival

The comissioned works will appear in a variety of venues and locations, including new sites at Trinity Apse, one of the city's old Gothic kirks, and an abandoned police box on Easter Road, which will feature a new sound installation work by Yann Seznec. Amar Kanwar will screen The Sovereign Forest in the debating chamber at Edinburgh’s Old Royal High School, open again after an extended period of rennovation; and Shilpa Gupta will showcase her contribution to the vast Commonwealth-derived show Where do I end and you begin in a special outdoor pop-up location at the same site.

Meanwhile, 20 artists and five curators will take over the City Arts Centre for a major new exhibition. Emerging artists will be showcased at the city's Talbot Rice Gallery, in an exhibition called Counterpoint, which will feature performance art, installations and more from Shona Macnaughton, Michelle Hannah, Ellie Harrison, Jeans & Macdonald and others. 

Michelle Hannah, Glass (2013). Photograph by Patrick Jameson

Tying into the major, coutry-wide retrospective of Scottish contemporary art, GENERATION, will be new exhibitions featuring work by Craig Coulthard and Jacqueline Donnachie. The Skinny are also curating an exhibition which will run for the duration of the EAF in Leith's Creative Exchange, formerly the Corn Exchange Gallery. For the last seven years a student from each of Duncan of Jordanstone, Edinburgh College of Art and Glasgow School of Art has been selected to show their work in the Showcase section, a double page spread that acts as a virtual exhibiting space and the centre point of the magazine. This year the selection will be expanded to include Gray's School of Art, and brought into the real world with this exhibition. Four fine art graduates will be chosen by The Skinny's editor Rosamund West in partnership with EAF director Sorcha Carey and displayed in this unique show. 

Martin Creed, Work No.1059 (Scotsman Steps, 2011). Copyright the artist. Photo by Gautier Deblonde. Commissioned by The Fruitmarket Gallery for Edinburgh Art Festival.

The Skinny spoke exclusively to Sorcha Carey about this year's programme. How does she go about getting the balance right between local and international artworks and artists? "Scotland belongs to a wider world and it's really important that our programme reflects this, not least because many Scottish artists are exhibiting internationally and well known to international art audiences," she replies.

Speaking about the previous EAF commissions still in situ in the city, by artists such as Callum Innes and Martin Creed, Carey comments: "It's wonderful that our commissioning programme has resulted in several major artworks permanently gifted to the city – but our approach is very much led by the artist and their individual practice, and some works and sites will inevitably lend themselves more to permanence than others. It's also really important to remember the other kinds of traces that public art projects can leave, traces which are less visible as art but no less permanent. The way in which artists reintroduce us to places that we had turned our backs on, for example; or the inadvertent side effects of their engagement with a particular site. Christine Borland and Brody Condon's work for the Calton watchtower in 2013 required a whole programme of repairs to the building which will protect it for the longer term, for example."

Some of last year's artworks, and those from previous years, have really captured a sense of place, opening a dialogue between the artist and Edinburgh, or between the artist, and Scotland. We asked Carey how important it is for the commissioned works to be site or region-specific. She replies: "Our commissions programme is very much intended to provide a platform for artists making work outside the gallery, and as entirely new work, it's often reflecting a very particular context, though this can be as much a particular time as a particular site. This year our programme reflects the extraordinary convergence of past and future which will colour 2014 in Scotland, as we remember important moments in history, and are asked to take part in a referendum on Scotland's future."

The comissioned artworks for EAF 2014 will be on display from 31 July to 31 August at venues throughout the city – visit the EAF site for more details of the shows featuring comissioned works.

CREATIVE SCOTLAND ANNOUNCE 2014 ARTIST BURSARIES
Creative Scotland have announced the names of artists, writers and other creative practitioners awarded bursaries for 2014/15, featuring some of the best and brightest emerging artists in the country. Duncan Campbell, nominated for this year's Turner Prize, received £30,000 "towards the research and development of an idea for a feature film, and the presentation of a composite production model." Artists Scott Myles and Frances Priest were each awarded £30,000 to support their ongoing endeavours, which include creating large-scale public artworks, and further developing their bodies of work.

Artists awarded £15,000 bursaries include Rob Churm, artist and designer Ross Collins, Lotte Gertz, performance artist Nic Green, jeweller and silversmith Kathryn Hinton, Roxanne Permar and Susan Timmins, and many others. Smaller £5,000 bursaries were also awarded to a range of emerging artists, including Lauren Gault, Kevin Hutcheson, Niall Macdonald and others. Ahead of planned changes to the way the arts are funded in Scotland, the Bursary programme has one final date for artists to apply for funds – find out more here, and apply by 5 August 2014 to be in with a chance of receiving one of the final round of bursaries.

EXHIBITION: INFLUENCE @ THE MARBURAE GALLERY, MACCLESFIELD
Influence is a new exhibition taking place at the Marburae Gallery in Macclesfield. Showcasing work by London-based artist Lucy Sparrow, Polish-born artist Marcelina Amelia and British artist Kate Lynch, and featuring giant felt spraycans; site-specific projections influenced by William Morris's pattern work and frank and graphic illustrations exploring human sexuality, Influence will present challenging, conceptual, image-driven work.

Art by Lucy Sparrow, courtesy of the artist and Marburae Gallery

Usually, the Marburae Gallery features 12 artists in each exhibition; for Influence, they have focused on just three, allowing them to present large-scale works. The exhibition opens on 5 June, and runs until 26 July. More details can be found here