2nd Prize
Winner: Maria
Tarrant (Jersey)
Untitled: Mixed
media
I met Maria Tarrant after my
selection, on the evening of my own 'private view' at the Arts Centre. At the
time she didn't know she had won second prize, and I wasn't able to reveal it.
She described to me the ideas underlying her work, and it turned out that
the submitted piece was one of a series. She spoke of expressing impotent
anger.
The cutout paper
heads claustrophobically crowding a glassed-in box, their lips
stitched shut with fine black thread; make visible (if not audible) a voice
that has been silenced repeatedly. The piece is skilfully made, and it is
all the more shocking for being so delicate. Loose tails of threads curl and
loop in all directions, and it's hard not to imagine how they'd feel, all those
tickling ends, without flinching at the idea of it. This work, too, haunted me
all day.
Clive Hicks-Jenkins,
2012 Fox Open Art Competition judge
Overall exhibition comments:
An artwork needs to earn its keep. I'm
not interested in art as wallpaper; so comfortable to live with that it ceases
to be any more than decoration. I want to be moved by art, confronted,
irritated even. I expect it to call out continually. I want to look at it and
have it look right back, ask questions of me, lay down a challenge, demand
attention.
This
is what I was looking for in the works I selected for the thirtieth Fox Art
Prize. I found it in all the winning submissions, in the five highly commended
runners-up and in all twenty-nine works that make up the rest of the
exhibition. I would happily live with any of these on my walls, or even
with all of them. I hoped for energy of execution, and the
submissions whirred and buzzed with it. I hoped for direct expression, and I
got that too. I worried that there might not be sufficient quality to make an
exhibition. My worries were unfounded and I had to pare away things that I
admired just to get down to an exhibitable number. I could have curated three
exhibitions, each one exciting, each with its own unique character. But in the
end there could only be one, and this is it.
The
artworks hanging today on the walls of the Berni Gallery comprise my selection
for the 2012 Fox Art Prize and Exhibition. There are slightly more than I was
told I could have: thirty-seven instead of thirty-five. I held out for an extra
two because I couldn't let them go. I'm not saying which two.
Clive Hicks-Jenkins,
2012 Fox Open Art Competition judge
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