Elizabeth Price has won this year’s Turner Prize, presented at Tate Britain tonight by the actor Jude Law. The prize is awarded to an artist under 50 living, working or born in Britain.
Price, who was nominated for her three-video show at BALTIC in February this year, receives a prize of £25,000. Her contribution to the Turner Prize exhibition is a 20-minute film, The Woolworths Fire of 1979, which combines church architecture, a 1960s girl band performance and the story of a blaze at a Manchester branch of Woolworths.
In her acceptance speech, Price firstly paid tribute to Turner Prize judge and Director of Modern Art Oxford, Michael Stanley, who died in September, describing him as “a good friend and great colleague to many people in this room”.
She also echoed earlier comments by Jude Law in opposition to Education Minister Michael Gove’s exclusion of the arts from the new English Baccalaureate (Ebacc), which is to replace GCSEs in English schools.
“My career as an artist is unimaginable without state support for the arts, from a comprehensive school education to free university education,” she said.
The Bradford-born artist, who grew up in Luton, added that she was “sick” of people criticising comprehensive education and was concerned about how the exclusion of the arts from the Ebacc would impact on the next generation of artists, describing it as “incredibly depressing that a young girl going to school in Luton might not be able to imagine being an artist”.
Price was second favourite to win this year’s prize behind Paul Noble, who has spent the last 16 years creating his meticulous pencil drawings of the fictional Nobson Newtown. The shortlist also included Spartacus Chetwynd – the first time a performance artist has been nominated since the prize began in 1984.
The bookies outsider on the list was Glasgow artist Luke Fowler, who was nominated for his show at Inverleith House, Edinburgh. His contribution to the Turner Prize show is the 93-minute film All Divided Selves, about the Glasgow psychologist RD Laing.
The Turner Prize continues at Tate Britain until 6 January.
