DLA Piper Art Award 2007

27th April – 19th May

The seven finalists of the DLA Piper Art Award for graduate artists have now been selected. After visiting approximately 40 degree shows in England, Scotland, and Wales, the gallery presented a shortlist of 35 artists to a committee comprising Louise Jury from the Independent Newspaper, Tom Hammick, an established painter, and Andrew Harris, a partner at DLA Piper. Seven artists were then chosen to exhibit their work at the gallery between the 27th April, and the 19th May 2007. The winner will be awarded a prize of £5,000.00 to help establish themselves during what is always a difficult first few months out of college.

Established in 2001, the Award helps to recognise the enormous talent of many of the students currently studying fine art in the UK. Despite often crippling costs involved, these young artists demonstrate a true passion and commitment for their chosen career. With the winning piece bought for the DLA Piper collection, and many others purchased both by DLA Piper and private collectors, the Award aims to help the selected artists through the demanding transitional period they experience when leaving college, in which they need to find studio space, develop new ideas outside a college environment, and start to build a market for their work. The exposure that the Award provides is invaluable at this early stage of their careers and can give the artists the kick-start that they need.

The sponsorship by DLA Piper also enables more colleges to be visited than for any other graduate award, which means that talented students in many of the smaller colleges can have their work seen and potentially put through to the shortlist. Both BA and MA degree shows are seen by the gallery, once again to enable exceptional students from some of the lesser-known courses to be considered for the shortlist.

It is still rare for companies to run awards that support emerging artists, especially ones that offer prize money, and DLA Piper’s commitment to the Award is hugely admirable and much appreciated by the students that it benefits.

This year’s finalists have demonstrated the increasing levels of professionalism that are needed to survive and prosper in such a competitive environment. They are all remarkably organised, aware of the intricacies of the art market, and have hit the ground running as soon as they have left the college environment. Most have already established themselves in new studios, exhibited internationally, and built on the momentum that their degree shows have given them. They are also multi-talented -aware that to survive as an artist in the early stages of a career usually requires more than one source of income, several also play in bands, or run their own companies to help finance their artistic practice. All have the potential to become successful full-time artists, and the winner of the award will receive vital assistance in realising their ambition.

The DLA Piper Art Award 2007 finalists are:

• Annabel Emson, MFA Fine Art, Slade School, London. Annabel makes paintings that refer to atmosphere and light. She is interested in creating environments that are on the edge of something tangible but not definable. Working with images from memory and photographs she uses colour, form, and tone to play with the limits and beginnings of the medium of paint. The paintings start as an idea of a culmination of what she has been looking at, reading and responding to, and in the process develop into images of their own, autonomous and separate from the starting point.
• Jackie Clark, MA Painting, City and Guilds of London Art School. Her painting practice explores impermanence within the landscape of our everyday environment. Her journeys into the city on public transport offer fragmented, impressionistic glimpses of a constantly changing landscape, which are photographically documented and translated into miniature paintings resembling the ‘snapshot’.
• Jacob Carter, BA Photography, Camberwell College of Arts, London. Jacob’s most recent work is the result of a long interest in the aesthetic of early photographic methods, in particular colour postcards from the 18th century. He synthesises particular colours, textures and tones that have become synonymous with a more primitive era of photography. The techniques are the result of much research, experimenting with methods such as Gum Bichromate and salt printing, as well as using varnishes. The resulting images were created using specifically chosen expired film stock (expiry date 1970!) and then perfecting the images digitally.
• Jo Robertson, MFA Painting, Slade School, London. Jo’s practice is connected to the performance of painting, and the fractured method of constructing an image intuitively. Rigorous, experimental, and sensual, the work is powerful and absorbing.
• Sarah Douglas, MA Painting, Royal College of Art, London. Sarah’s work is concerned with discovering ways to materialize a very personal subject matter through an engagement with paint and the act of painting. It is about exploring the mysterious territory between the real and the imagined, the representational and the abstract, until forms come into being that demand to be worked with and resolved.
• Michael Kutschbach, MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art, London. Working with mixed-media, Michael’s work makes reference to graphic design systems, sign writing techniques, architectural facades and design objects and surfaces. There is a play between computer assisted surface effects and the tangible human interaction with material. These paintings and their installation are intended to be read as a kind of sensual abstraction, whereby the surface of the painting or wall is designed to attract the viewer as much by haptic as visual sensation.
• Nick Goss, BA Painting, Slade School, London. Nick’s paintings contain a romanticism and childlike interest in the world’s empty spaces. He creates listless and melancholic atmospheres that draw on echoes of untamed places, into which he inserts fragments of everyday city life. This subverts the landscapes, giving them an eerie, timeless feel. Further sources such as music and literature influence the paintings and aid the construction of the dense atmospheres within the work