SCAF EAA 2023 Shortlisted Artists

The SCAF Emerging Artist Award has been created to acknowledge up and coming artists of all ages who are living in the Yorkshire region. The intent of the award is to bring recognition and awareness to outstanding visual artists in the region who are at the early stages of their career and who have not yet established a reputation as an artist amongst art curators, buyers, critics and the general public.

The theme for the SCAF Emerging Artist Award 2023 is LIGHT. As we emerge from the Covid pandemic, surrounded by the rhetoric of threatened climate crisis, food shortages, rising prices and ever increasing social pressures, it is hard to feel lightness of spirit or connect with joy and creativity in our lives . Exploring the theme of light and finding your own way of interpreting and expressing 'light' will offer a healthy counterbalance to the heaviness and darkness often experienced in these times. The visual arts have a long history of using light both as a subject and a tool to create emotion and drama, or simply to lead the eye to a specific aspect of composition.

We are delighted to introduce to you the 10 SCAF EAA finalists for this years award who are currently working on their final pieces from their winning proposals.

Congratulations 

Cameron Lings, David McQuillan , Jacqui Barrowcliffe, Jess Kidd, Joanna Byrne,

Olga Prinku, Rachel Morrell, Ros Walker, Steffi Callaghan, Sue Mann

The shortlisted pieces will enter a final round of judging and the award recipients will be announced at the SCAF EAA 2023 Exhibition opening on Saturday 1st July.

Cameron Lings is an award winning contemporary artist and sculptor based in the North East of England. Recently, in 2021, he graduated from The MIMA School of Art and Design with a Masters Degree in Fine Art. His artistic practice consists primarily of generating sculptural form from bodies of statistics, information and data sets. Cameron commonly utilizes the mediums of woodwork and metalwork throughout his projects, along with mixed media works when challenging key topics around current affairs. Cameron's wider practice explores the realm of experimental form, shape and material. By intertwining drawing with sculpture, he questions the boundaries of 2D and 3D art practices.

David McQuillan was born in Huddersfield and currently lives and works in Todmorden in the Calder Valley at the edge of West Yorkshire. David specialises in highly detailed ink drawings influenced by fine art etchings, gothic book illustrations, fairy tales and folk songs. The Yorkshire landscape features prominently in his work both in terms of a literal environment and a symbolic representation of our internal, mental landscapes.

Jacqui Barrowcliffe works across various disciplines, but mainly photography and installation, Jacqui's work focuses on process and impermanence. Inspired by both domestic and natural environments she responds to her everyday surroundings to develop a narrative that is both personal and universal. Her work aims to connect with the viewer on an emotional level, through pieces that explore themes such as loss, memories and change, reflecting on the traces we leave behind. Since moving to the North Yorkshire coast her work has increasingly focused on change and impermanence in the natural world, using the photographic process cyanotype as a medium to explore this.

Jess Kidd is a multidisciplinary, Yorkshire-based artist, with a current focus on mixed-media painting. She graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2008. However, her practice has re-emerged recently, after serious illness in her mid-20s. she loves to experiment, play with, and manipulate materials, and is driven by a passionate intention to convey her interpretations of reality. Recently, she has been exploring landscape in relation to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This influences both her creative process and her subject matter – her hometown, Keighley. She aims to paint aesthetically engaging images of Keighley, to encourage conversations that aren't just grounded in negative assumptions.

Joanna Byrne (she/her) is a Leeds/Bradford-based artist filmmaker and writer who takes material, performative, collaborative and sustainable approaches to creating still and moving photographic images. She works with analogue film in a tactile way, processing and editing by hand, often incorporating physical traces of her body into the work. Joanna is interested in the therapeutic potential of experimental collaborative film practices: connecting us as individuals to each other, to communities, shared histories and stories, the wider world and Planet Earth. In 2022 she was awarded an a-n artist’s bursary to develop new sustainable practices in analogue filmmaking and photography.

Olga Prinku is an embroidery artist who uses real organic material as her thread. She uses various techniques to attach natural materials – such as dried and preserved flowers, foliage, grasses, seedheads and berries – to tulle fabric. Olga created the concept of flowers-on-tulle embroidery in 2016, and the techniques she uses are entirely self-taught. Her first book, Dried Flower Embroidery: An Introduction to the Art of Flowers on Tulle, was published in 2021. Originally from the Republic of Moldova, Olga lives with her husband and son in North Yorkshire, where she takes inspiration from nature on long walks in the local countryside.

Rachel Morrell creates abstract and semi-abstract paintings and textiles inspired by the scars, moorland, derelict barns and former industrial ruins in North Yorkshire. Her current interest is the ruined abbeys. Her work has many layers that represent the textures and patterns of the landscape and buildings and there are often elements within her work that are suggestions of forms glimpsed through mist. She has an MA in Creative Practice from Leeds Arts University. She is a successful exhibitor with the North Yorks Open Studios 2022/23 and the Great North Art Show 2022.

Ros Walker is a mixed media artist working mainly in ceramics. She uses clay dug from the ground where she lives and works in North Yorkshire as well as commercially available clay. Her inspiration comes primarily from the landscape around her and a fascination with the transient, fragile beauty of the natural world. The thin veil between life and death, the changing light and cycle of the seasons all leave their mark on her work. She will often combine different techniques and materials, and enjoys pushing the boundaries of both to achieve exciting results. Photograph by Rachel Rimell.

Steffi Callaghan is an abstract painter and works using acrylic and acrylic collage (MA in Art & Science: Central Saint Martins, 2021). Her MA research focused on the deep sea and she continues to be inspired by inaccessible, mysterious and/or overlooked spaces of our world. Her work has been shown at many galleries including Tate Exchange, Saatchi Gallery, Bargehouse, Asylum Chapel, Arts Depot and the Mercer Gallery. She was awarded The Other Art Fair Graduate Art Prize in 2021 and also shortlisted for the Gucci Global Design Award. Since graduating she works from her studio in Harrogate.

Sue Mann makes contemporary abstract drawings in response to architecture to explore how interior spaces make us feel. Recent works are inspired by architectural light and comprise layers of charcoal drawings activated by light in the space. The translucent layers of drawings interact with each other in response to rhythms of natural light, gradually altering the character of the work and revealing different aspects over time.

The 10 works will be exhibited and open to the public at The Art House @ SCAF from 1st July to 11th August (open 3 days a week - dates and times will be published in May)

Scott Creative Arts Foundation is a charity registered in England and Wales - 1168545

www.scottcreativeartsfoundation.org.uk

www.scafemergingartist.co.uk