Northern Art Prize 2007
Exhibition | Artists | Nominations
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Exhibition
The Northern Art Prize 2007 exhibition, featuring work by all the shortlisted artists Eric Bainbridge, Tim Brennan, Dan Holdsworth, Pope + Guthrie (winners) took place at Leeds Art Gallery from 22 November 2007 until 10 February 2008.
The exhibition was accompanied by a full colour catalogue which is still available to buy at £5.99 from Leeds Art Gallery on 0113 2478256 or city.art.gallery@leeds.gov.uk
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Artists
Eric Bainbridge | Tim Brennan | Dan Holdsworth | Pope + Guthrie
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Eric Bainbridge
Nominated by Paul Moss and Miles Thurlow, Directors, Workplace Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Recently Eric Bainbridge experienced culture shock in Bangkok. There on a British Council residency Bainbridge speaks of a place of extremes where the sacred and profane coexist and merge, the artist’s awe and terror embodied in Bangkok’s river – the Chao Phraya – a constant brown ooze from the heart of the jungle, a place where you don’t survive. As a result of this trip Bainbridge has produced a series of new ‘Bangkok’ sculptures that present a New Modernism. His cool refined structures articulate space and modernist architectural ideas as a strategy of escape from the engulfing sweaty humidity of a city known as much form a western eye for its cheapness of life and sex industry as it is for its traditional heritage of religion and culture. Despite the artist’s attempts Bangkok seeps back in through the tropical hardwoods of Thai DIY stores, fake melamine, and a cheap looking novelty light bulb winking flirtatiously from purple to blue to green to red
‘New Modernism Post Bangkok’, 2007
by Eric Bainbridge
LED light bulb, rubber flex, melamine, iroko
Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery
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Tim Brennan
Nominated by Alistair Robinson Programme Director, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland
Brennan’s most recent body of work ‘The North’ was created over a three-year period. Originating from his performance walks around the region he has labelled ‘greater Northumbria’, as series of beguiling images open up alternative histories of how ‘the north’ can be re-read. Northumbria was the greatest centre of learning in Europe during the late middle ages, marked by the greatest concentration of monasteries in Europe. It was also the seat of the country’s first historian, Bede. The idea of ‘the north’ and its representation in images and language, in both history and the present day, have been Brennan’s key concerns since 2004. A series of exhibitions at NGCA, Spacex, and Aberdeen of 15 large-scale images have extended Brennan’s practice into new areas - combining the latest and most democratic technologies of image-making with the aesthetics of British Romanticism.
‘The History of Blue, Clashmach Hill’, 2006
by Tim Brennan
112.5 x 150cm Lightjet print
Courtesy of the artist
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Dan Holdsworth
Nominated by Godfrey Worsdale, Director, MIMA, Middlesbrough
Dan Holdsworth’s photographs document remote and inhospitable places, remarkable interiors, images made at the time of day when we’re sleeping: the things we miss when left to our own devices. Initially, there appears to be an analytical commitment continuing through the work, not quite National Geographic but certainly making use of our shared inclination to consume remarkable revelations of the world. These kinds of images seduce us into taking a long hard look in pursuit of what we assume to be new knowledge, an eye-opener, an expansion of our personal visual lexicon. Dan Holdsworth makes images that are unremittingly engaging and that appeal is located at the balance point between the picture and what is pictured. What is especially compelling is the synthesis between the two and how it is so effectively constructed. The result enables the viewer to glide into a space where a remarkable subject stops and a beguiling depiction begins.
‘Ghosts 2’, 2007
by Dan Holdsworth
122 x 152cm
C-Type print mounted onto aluminium
Courtesy of the artist and STORE London
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Pope + Guthrie (winners)
Nominated by Fiona Venables, Visual Arts Officer, Tullie House Museum and Gallery, Carlisle
Pope + Guthrie work with a range of communities and environments to give voice to peripheral sections of society and value to folk culture. In 2005 they produced their first feature length film Bata-ville: We Are Not Afraid Of The Future which followed former employees of now-closed UK Bata shoe factories in East Tilbury and Maryport on an organised coach party, and Living with the Tudors in 2006-07 to explore the culture of re-enactment societies. Before embarking on the latter film they participated – across a timescale of three years - in one of the UK’s oldest and largest historical re-creations at Kentwell Hall in Suffolk. They recorded their experiences using pinhole photography, painting, video diaries, and footage from cameras buried in their costumes. The artists employ a non-segregated approach to practitioners, participants and audiences and successfully identify the importance of ‘local’ within an international context.
‘Bata-ville: We are not afraid of the future’
by Karen Guthrie + Nina Pope, 2005
122 x 152cm
Production still: John Podpadec
Courtesy of the artists
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Nominations
The long listed artists for 2007 were:
AL and AL (Al Holmes + Al Taylor), Art Gene (Maddi Nicholson + Stuart Bastik), Brass Art (Anneke Pettican, Chara Lewis + Kristin Mojsiewicz), Eric Bainbridge, Catherine Bertola, Sian Bowen, Tim Brennan, Tessa Bunney, Graham Dolphin, Leo Fitzmaurice, Somewhere (Karen Guthrie + Nina Pope), Matthew Houlding, Dan Holdsworth, Duncan Higgins, Laura Lancaster, Dinu Li, Susie MacMurray, Owl Project (Simon Blackmore, Antony Hall, Steve Symons), Carole Romaya, Emma Rushton + Derek Tyman, Sarah Spanton, Linder Sterling, Carl von Weiler, Wolfgang Weileder
The nominators for 2007 were:
North East
Judith King, Independent Curator, Northumberland;
Paul Moss, Director, Workplace Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Alistair Robinson, Programme Director, Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art, Sunderland; Godfrey Worsdale, Director, MIMA, Middlesbrough
North West
Ceri Hand, Artistic Director, Metal Culture, Liverpool;
Kwong Lee, Director, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester;
Adam Sutherland, Independent Curator, Grizedale Arts, Cumbria; Fiona Venables, Curator, Tullie House Museum
and Gallery, Carlisle
Yorkshire
Anne Goodchild, Independent Curator, Sheffield; Timandra Gustafson, Executive Director, Axis, Leeds; Clare Lilley, Curator, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; Pippa Oldfield, Programme Manager, Impressions Gallery, Bradford
