Film and Video Umbrella and Jerwood Charitable Foundation have announced Lucy Clout and Marianna Simnett as the winners of the second edition of the Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards. Both artists will receive commissions of £20,000 to allow the development of major new moving-image works that will premiere at Jerwood Space, London and Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in 2015.
The winners were selected from a shortlist that also included Kate Cooper and Anne Haaning. All four artists were awarded bursaries of £4,000 in 2013 to develop pilot projects that respond to the curatorial brief and title ‘What Will They See of Me?’.
Lucy Clout’s commission will continue her focus on the background noise of everyday life. Her first-stage project, The Extra’s Ever-Moving Lips, uncovered the background voices of TV extras. Moving beyond this initial research, she will look to the thoughts that lurk at the back of people’s minds and to the online world where private lives are increasingly on public display. The new work will concentrate on acts of self-exposure and reveal ‘the mundane complications that occur when words refuse to disappear’.
Mythological horizons
In Marianna Simnett’s first-stage work, The Udder, the purity of milk and the struggle to keep it free from outside contamination are symbols of other forms of pristine innocence, and the wider threat of corruption. Further developing the central themes of this work, Simnett will broaden her focus from the farmyard to more far-flung, mythological horizons – ‘from the sworn virgins of the mountains of Albania (and their esoteric oaths of chastity), to the figures of medieval saints as embodiments of female virtue’.
The selection panel for What Will They See of Me? included: Ed Atkins, artist; Steven Bode, director, Film and Video Umbrella; Shonagh Manson, director, Jerwood Charitable Foundation; Francis McKee, director, CCA, Glasgow; and Catherine Wood, curator of contemporary art and performance at Tate Modern.
On announcing the awards, the selection panel said: “All four artists have raised the bar to remarkable heights with the rigour and ambition of their development works, but for the singularity and pertinence of their proposals, we commended Lucy Clout and Marianna Simnett for the awards. Their brave, confident grasp of the layers and complexities of their ideas was invigorating.”
Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards: What Will They See of Me? Continues at Jerwood Space, London until 27 April, and at CCA, Glasgow, until 21 April. whatwilltheyseeofme.org.uk
