The winner of this year’s Fleming-Wyfold Foundation Bursary, presented at the opening of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) New Contemporaries, is Edward Humphrey.
A 2014 graduate of The Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee, Humphrey receives a bursary of £10,000, plus £4,000 production costs for the next year.
Humphrey won the prize for his film installation, Another Fiction, currently showing as part of the RSA New Contemporaries show in Edinburgh, which features the work of 72 recent graduates. The exhibition includes work from 2014 fine art degree shows at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Glasgow School of Art, Edinburgh College of Art, Gray’s School of Art and Moray School of Art.
Phil Long, director of V&A Dundee and one of the judges, said: “After a long and challenging discussion the judges selected Edward Humphrey’s dual video; we were struck by its beauty and intellectual curiosity.”
Humphrey said of his winning piece: “Another Fiction is a two-screen film that uses borrowed and recorded speech to explore the necessity of conceptual frameworks to our understanding of a complex reality.
“Disparate voices come and go, expressing often quite uncomfortable ideas into a cocoon-like exhibition space. The images are discordant, but like the belief mechanism the work considers, once you stop resisting, it starts to make sense; and your own connections fill in the blanks.”
The judging panel for the award, now in its second year, also included the artist Graham Fagen; visual arts journalist Griselda Murray Brown; David Benson, trustee of the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation; and Selina Skipwith, art consultant and former director of the Fleming Collection.
Fagen, who is representing Scotland at this year’s Venice Biennale, described the RSA New Contemporaries show as “a fantastic exhibition”. He said: “I was impressed with the life and ambition evident in the work this year.”
More on a-n.co.uk:
RSA New Contemporaries 2015: work by 72 graduates from across Scotland
