Artists’ Profiles 2013

Selecting works for the Aesthetica Art Prize is an inspirational and enlightening experience. There are so many artists worldwide creating pieces that need to be seen. Below is a short synopsis from each 2013 longlisted artist, providing insight into their practice.


Photographic & Digital Art

Alec Von Bargen

Von Bargen’s images are waking companions, accomplices and alibis. The work reveals a n immediate dialogue with the world.

Anja de Jong

Since the 1990s de Jong has produced projects based on climate and water issues that affect the regions she visits and the wider world.

Beverley Cornwell

As an observational photographer, Cornwell has a keen interest in people, animals and the architecture that surrounds and separates them.

Bryon Darby

Darby’s photographic practice is concerned with ideas of place as mediated through personal experience, technology and photography.

Calum James Crowther

Crowther attempts to combine a fascination with films and narrative paintings in the construction of single large-scale photographs.

Chloe Lelliott

Lelliott’s photography revolves around an experience of place; how individuals navigate and construct certain spaces, seeking the intangible.

Constantinos Taliotis

Taliotis freezes recurring narrative tropes as they appear in  films. The photographs function as fragments of absent grand narratives.

Damien O’Mara

* Main Prize Winner*
O’Mara’s photographic series investigates contemporary masculinity through traditional work roles, interrogating the value of positions.

Daniel Shiel

The subjects Shiel photographs have “minor histories” from their creation to destruction; from usefulness to abandonment.

Dareen Hussein

The featured piece is taken from a series which addresses Hussein’s own challenges with the age-old cultural ideals of “home.”

Herman James

Working in painting, drawing and digital photomontage, James presents compelling images of global climate change.

Irene Fearnside

A theme that runs through much of Fearnside’s photography is making connections with places and people who hold personal significance.

Jennifer Georgescu

Mother documents a journey over eight years, from a disconnection with the self, to realising the legacy of children.

Jiseon Hwang

Hwang’s featured work, Cocoon, was created through three-dimensional paper work and is based on a Möbius strip.

Juliet Ferguson

Ferguson contrasts the mundanity of everyday life with the voyeurism of watching people who have no idea that they are under scrutiny.

Luzena Adams

By tapping into a perennial milieu using archetypical themes, Adams aims to illustrate the modern states of isolation and vulnerability.

Maria Mor Huertas

In Old Time Talk, the featured work, the beauty of a phone bound with a cord and a spinning dial is a nostalgic flashback to the past .

Marie Wengler

Wengler’s artistic practice ofocuses on the use of digital manipulation techniques, and the boundaries between reality and fiction. 

Mark Braniff

Braniff’s work is concerned with the essence of things, capturing the fleeting beauty of the impermanence of the physical and natural world,

Martha Zmpounou

Zmpounou’s work revolves around the human figure. The forms are treated as visual symbols positing human characteristics,

Mary Humphrey

*Shortlisted*
Through the medium of social, collaborative photography, Humphrey is committed to pursuing a passion for education.

Nick Greenwich

Greenwich’s work is linked with a crisis of moral dualism, exploring the dichotomy between faith and doubt in a transitory life.

Nigel Lord

ndustry is the central theme of much of Lord’s work, in the form of manufacturing facilities, power stations, building sites and machinery.

Pär Axell

Axell’s practice often deals with the city, tracking the lived experiences of communities whilst exploring monumental and material values.

Rianna Goss

The aesthetic juxtaposition of a modern angel with an antique market on Portobello Road struck Goss when creating the featured work.

Ron Bambridge

Bambridge’s portfolio consists of a combination of landscape and portraits of interesting people from the artist’s diverse travels.

Ryota Kajita

The aim of the featured image was to capture the pure and quiet belief of Shinto, and to express the contrast and unity between humans and nature.

Sarah Francis

Working with both traditional and digital media, Francis’ art explores ideas of reality, representation and the duality of photography.

Sarah Tod

Tod’s work focuses on the creation of large-scale painterly images made through combining  layers of landscape photography.

Spencer Winnett

Spencer Winnett is a documentary photographer who is passionate about the remote and subtle stories of everyday people.

Vasilisa Forbes

Forbes’ work focuses on society’s relationship with surrounding environments and technology, experimenting with new forms of communication.

 


Three Dimensional Design & Sculpture

Aaron Heino

Aaron Heino’s works are utopias; they depict the ideal. Universal hedonism is an attitude to life which shows in the way of working. 

Abigail Brown

Abigail Brown is an artist silversmith specialising in a hammer forming technique. Her metalwork is unique and gracefully sculptural.

Aether & Hemera

Aether & Hemera’s artistic aim is to research the aesthetics of light and its emotional power to trigger the viewer’s response.

An Yung Yau

An Yung Yau works across sculpture, installation and painting. Personal collections are her main inspirations and palette.

Andrea Spencer

Spencer is concerned with creating environments that shape the perception of an object, and, in doing so, extend the meaning of that object.

Ben Applegarth

As a method-based artist, Applegarth investigates the ways in which light interacts with objects, employing a clinical approach.

Benjamin Nash

Often using the universally familiar as a point of reference, Nash’s work probes the soul of major catastrophes or social issues of present times.

Chandra Paul

Chandra Paul employs a range of sculptural modalities including object-based, ephemeral, installation and outdoor public art.

Chika Modum

Presence, the featured work, is rooted in explorations surrounding cultural dislocation, disconnection and hybridity.

Emel Hamlet

Coming from an architectural background, tectonic forms with clean lines are always at the core of Emel Hamlet’s work.

Hollie Mackenzie

Hollie Mackenzie explores the notion of the impossible Utopia by creating a dystopian landscape through installation.

Iluá Hauck da Silva

The core of Iluá Hauck da Silva’s practice is investigating existential concepts from challenging angles, using a wide range of media.

Jay Battle

Jay Battle is inspired by seeing the evidence of man within a “natural” environment. The work is informed by the impressions left in the landscape.

Jo Aylmer

Using the potential of rubber and clay, Jo Aylmer is motivated by an interest in physical and psychological responses to material and form.

Joon Park

A use of pedestals signifies Joon Park’s interest in the distinction between high and low culture and establishing non-hierarchical dynamics.

Julian Voss-Andreae

Voss-Andreae’s sculptural interpretation of the Sphinx brings with it a postmodern twist, rewriting an undefined narrative

Jurgen Winkler

In Jurgen Winkler’s sculptures, installations, drawings and photographs, humour is often perceptible; with an aching undercurrent.

Kyunghee Park

*People’s Choice Winner*
Heavily influenced by childhood, Park’s work focuses on certain customs that have been handed down since ancient times.

Line Jakobsen

Jakobsen is fascinated with foam: from its aesthetic qualities, to its creation. The artist uses the qualities of hot glass to emulate its forms.

Lisa Pettibone

The sculptural form of Pettibone’s work is the result of observing the natural forces that shape the environment: gravity, wind and energy.

Llewelynn Fletcher

Llewelynn Fletcher creates inhabitable sculptures made for listening to one’s own inner space and body, using clothing and architecture.

Maren C Raaum Gyllenhammar

The featured piece was part of the major project for the artist’s degree, in which comprises graphic art exploring different disasters.

Miik Green

The basis of Miik Green’s practice lies in an ability to translate microforms such as fungi and coral into paintings and sculptural pieces.

Naomi Doran

Naomi Doran works instinctively, creating pieces that reflect a fascination with the natural decay of the industrial landscape.

Poppy Whatmore

*Student Prize Winner*
Whatmore uses assemblage to reconfigure anthropomorphic and zoomorphic forms, subverting and deconstructing them.

Rob Miller

Using musical boxes sourced from museum gift shops, the featured work, Sound Bombs, deals with the abject terror of familiar sounds.

Stephani Martinez

Interested in the beauty hidden in the dark corners, Stephani Martinez’s practice reflects an observation of intimate patterns.

Susan Forsyth

Susan Forsyth’s work explores aesthetics and sculpture-making processes through traditional fabrication, casting and performance practices.

 


Painting, Drawing & Mixed Media

Andrew Harrison

Harrison’s 3-D representations of standard architectural drawing techniques are rendered in MDF and acrylic, providing unique perspectives.

Caroline Burraway

Burraway aims to confront sociocultural issues that lie at the core of modern society, seeking a truthful visual language.

Caroline Hartley

The featured work, Grace, reminds viewers that they are a part of our planet, not apart from it. aiming to regain sight of what matters most.

Caroline Jane Harris

*Shortlisted*
Caroline Jane Harris explores the intricacies of nature through a labour intensive paper-cutting technique, responding to visual phenomena.

Clare Walter

*Shortlisted*
Walter works with three-dimensional sculpture and installation on two-dimensional surfaces, focusing on personal and political dialogues.

David Wightman

Wightman makes landscape paintings using acrylic and collaged wallpaper, focusing  on ideas of the picturesque, the romantic and the sublime.

Day Bowman

Bowman explores the landscapes of Britain that are passed through, ignored or deleted from the collective memory, offering a gritty journey.

Elfyn Lewis

Lewis focuses on richly worked surfaces, employing many inventive and risky strategies to exploit chance and accident in the works.

Eric Kasper

Absorbed in the social structure of everyday life, it is easy for the distinction between the individual and the collective to become blurred.

Esther Nienhuis

A longing to be elsewhere is the central theme of Nienhus’ work. The artist approaches the concept of unfulfilled desire as a condition.

Gracjana Rejmer

Rejmer finds inspiration in the urban landscape. This environment offers the opportunity to observe the deterioration of buildings.

Jack Spencer Ashworth

Ashworth seeks to portray an ambiguous and universal sense of a body through placing abstracted forms within space.

Jane Sampson

Sampson admires Robert Rauchenberg. The featured piece, Rauchenbirds, is titled with an appreciative nod to his free spirit.

Jeff Pigott

Pigott’s work focuses on landscape and urban imagery whilst attempting to explore the fragmentation of contemporary life.

Kelly Blevins

Blevins is a two-dimensional artist creating large scale work that combines the social stigmas of nudity, politics and philosophies.

Marcus Jansen

Jansen’s work is a result of working between abstract and figurative elements, crossing action painting with objective subject matter.

Mishael Lee

A bi-cultural background leads Lee to have an interest in mixing cultures, bringing things together and building bridges.

Nasser Ghaderi

Ghaderi’s paintings act as mirrors. The practitioner abstains from using conventional tools by throwing paint onto the canvas.

Phoebe Salmon

Salmon’s recent works have been influenced by Abstract Expressionism and the highly sophisticated works of Gerhard Richter.

Sarah Shaw

Shaw’s work hovers in a place between figuration and non-figuration, allowing the viewer the space to impose their interpretation.

Sonja Danowski

The featured painting is part of The Beginning, a picture book which contrasts tenderness with horror, and imagination with terrible hardship.

Timothy Lee

308.3 is a part of a series of works in which Lee confronts obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and uses it as a starting point.

Tony Girardot

Gidarot imposed a period of 12 hours when constructing the featured image, which reflects a series of dynamic and supple changes.

Twinkle Troughton

Troughton’s main practice is painting using acrylics on canvas. The artist makes work which is heavily influenced by British history.

 


Video, Installation & Performance

Ana Sladetic

Ana Sladetic is interested in researching the processes that surround human life, and the role played by communication.

Bess Kenway

Bess Kenway’s work reveals the erratic functioning of thought by stripping everyday objects of their normal function and meaning.

Daan den Houter

Daan den Houter seeks to bring multiple contradictory subjects together in the same single work, producing conflicting results.

Fiona McGurk

Working intuitively, McGurk’s interdisciplinary practice is informed by notions of accumulation, connection, interplay and context.

Gabriella Sonabend

Gabriella Sonabend’s practice is an extension of a fascination with everyday life and behavioural patterns, seeking to understand relationships.

Hyung-Gyu Kim

*Shortlisted*
Hyung-Gyu Kim works through a range of methodologies, employing video, sculpture, sound and electronics to forge hybrid memories.

Jamie Buckley

Jamie Buckley has a great interest in sites that are in transition, investigating what is concealed or revealed in the landscape.

Jordan Rodgers

The themes Jordan Rodgers pursues involve exploration between art and technology as means of documenting everyday journeys.

Josephine Sowden

Sowden’s aim is to draw the viewer’s attention to the consequences of a contemporary detachment from empathy.

Lees Rooney

Lees Rooney is a collaborative partnership interested in manipulation, examining the phenomenon of 21st century communication.

Leszek Blyszczynski

Leszek Blyszczynski searches for the best way to express a “dynamic impression”, and for new ways to achieve compositional depth. 

Lucy Knox

Lucy Knox is an artist preoccupied with notions of identity, exploring constructs of beauty and rapture, violence, desire, sexuality and gender.

Madaleine Trigg

Trigg’s work visually exposes and distorts the processes involved in its creation through a n experimental approach.

Nathalie Joffre

Joffre’s work in video and photography is concerned with society’s relationship to the past as a performative experience.

Petra Semerdjiev

Semerdjiev is a Finnish-Bulgarian photographer and audiovisual artist, exploring the relationship between physical and spiritual identities.

Sara Brannan

*Shortlisted*
Brannan’s practice is based around the appropriation and manipulation of films in the public domain, using them as found objects.

Sheena Graham-George

Multimedia artist Sheena Graham-George’s Lullaby features 15,000 paper butterflies hand cut from classic children’s books.

Sumiko Eadon

Inspired by the nightscape and lived experiences of Tokyo, Sumiko Eadon’s practice instigates an eerie and haunting aesthetic experience.