Artists’ Profiles 2016

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 2016 longlisted artist, providing insight into their practice.


Photographic & Digital Art

Anna Tihanyi

Tihanyi creates contemporary tales about the human consciousness, producing narratives that are concentrated into one single frame.

Attilio Fiumarella

After the city council’s decision to close the Moseley Road Baths, Fuimarella wanted to claim the importance of this facility for the local community.

Brian Galloway

Galloway’s series of portraits are of people who live nearby him. He notes: “Jack was a submariner during the war and was decorated several times.”

Bruno Fontana

Artifact provokes the viewer to ask questions – the small size of the images reminding the viewer of postcards, and their eternal idea of a perfect world.

Claire Rosen

Referencing Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, The Fantastical Feast is a collection of photographs that depicts live animals around banquet tables.

Constanze Kratzch

Cormorant emphasises the elegance of the bird by using a minimalist design vocabulary, focusing solely on the natural aesthetics.

Darren Nisbett

Nomad Spirit, the plain of Helusion is a photographic-based montage that creates a dreamlike sense of space and loneliness, using a stark arid desert.

Ellen Jantzen

As an artist who approaches photography as an art form, Jantzen is interested in states of reality and the ephemeral nature of sacred realms.

Ellie Davies

*Shortlisted*
The series considers the fragility of our relationship with the natural world, and the temporal and finite nature of landscape as a human construct. 

Gabriela Torres Ruiz

*Shortlisted*
The act of gathering and reordering images serves to generate new associations, new figurative and conceptual realities.

Huib Fens

Since 2010, Fens has been reconstructing workspaces of writers, composers and visual artists, enabling him to create virtual residencies.

Jamie Holman

Fallswater Drive – Openshaw Drive is from a series of photographs of dustbin lids that share titles with streets in both Belfast and Blackburn.

Johan Lund

Lund is a nature and landscape photographer from the west coast of Sweden. Into the mist captures a moment of peace and tranquillity.

Karolina Rupp

Landscape Study No. 7, part of the series Prospect Poem, is a landscape photograph shot on film in South Africa, playing with the idea of longing.

Kelsey Austin Walsh

For Walsh, photography is a means through to express oneself. The Downward Spiral is an image that delves into the deep realm of self-portraiture.

Lam Pok Yin Jeff & Chong Ng

The Untimely Apparatus of Two Amateur Photographers is an attempt to deconstruct and rethink the fundamental elements of photography.

Laurence Harding

As a reflection upon life’s fragile ambitions, the series entitled House of Cards portrays young people in front of lifestyle billboards.

Marcus Lyon

Lyon’s artworks draw on a mix of the real and the imagined as the images weave dynamic patterns of movement across the canvas of the stage.

Markus Jäger & ONUK Bernhard Schmitt

Electro deals specifically with old electronic waste by photographing each piece and then putting them together into a circular composition.

Matthew Humphreys

Humphreys explores the histories of the technologies that we use to document life, fascinated with the everyday routines that we engage with.

Nicholas Gentilli

I canna believe it’s Scotland is the artist’s take on the Highlands, Europe’s last wilderness, where nature prevails and fragile man lives under its authority.

Nick Dunmur

Kinetic is a body of work, comprising 16 black and white photographs, that seeks to explore the notion of energy, both its containment and its release.

Paul Kenny

Copper Mine No.2 is formed from fragile scraps of material collected along the Strand line: the line that marks the last high tide, and its flotsam and jetsam.

Pere Ibañez

Drawing on trauma and periods of grave illness, the works are as much a catharsis as a study in powerlessness, and the instinctive need to survive.

Richard John Seymour

China Commodity City depicts the largest wholesale small-commodity market, adopting the production methods of an assembly line.

Ritty Tacsum

That love is complex is no revelation, it can be found in so many places. This Love is Silent is the artist’s attempt to embody this complexity.

Robert Walker

Since 2010, Walker has utilised a reduced palette and understated composition to look at surroundings in a considered way.

Tadao Cern

Cern is a Lithuanian artist, who decided to stop being an architect and to try photography – resulting in projects including the depicted Comfort Zone .

Tony Maj

Through the use of the photographic image, Maj employs a self-confessional approach to conjure both the physical and psychological.

Vikram Kushwah

Kushwah’s photography is informed by the theory of “the uncanny” and by the Surrealists, who were masters of illustrating the subconscious.

 


Three Dimensional Design & Sculpture

Andi Schmied

State of Limbo, Sovereign House addresses the long-abandoned building of Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, which shaped the city of Norwich.

Ben Rowe

Rowe often juxtaposes an industrial sci-fi aesthetic with organic structures. Unobtainable Power represents an inaccessible central power source.

Dana Zelig

The Traces project explores the concept of programming everyday materials, a form of physical programming where objects are “made to act.”

David Ralston

In Ralston’s work in stone, including Granite Spiral, the artist explores concepts of latency, relative time and the realignment of nature.

James Bloomfield

Inspired by the Walt Whitman poem I Hear America Singing, Bloomfield’s work references a frontier past and the optimism of that time.

James Chinneck

Tueri Terram is a rare Egyptian stone resembling a human head. On its Facebook page the “like” button has been turned into a trigger.

James Winter

*Shortlisted*
The modular potential of Spatial Light Constructs allows the works to take on a parasitic nature, feeding upon their architectural hosts.

John Leighton

Leighton believes that objects can trigger more than memories. The subject of his work, Burden, derives not from theories, but from experiences.

Julian Voss-Andreae

Voss-Andreae’s scientific training has enabled the artist to take advantage of the latest technologies to achieve his artistic visions.

Krzysztof Renes

In Universale, Renes has explored not only purely sculptural issues, such as form, synthesis and spatiality, but also used anthropological research.

Michael Lyons

Auriga is part of an ongoing series called the Star Series, based on the stars and constellations and referring to cosmic myths from many ages and traditions.

Queenie Clarke

Escalator 0.3 is a free-standing sculpture. The form, far removed from a real escalator, is designed to evoke the idea of movement whilst being static.

Rachel Harding

Steam Specs, curate the audience’s view. The lenses are clear when looked at straight; however, they become frosted when viewed from an angle.

Robert Balfour Ward

The whole world has now been discovered is inspired by the age of heroes, notably the explorers of Antarctica, and is based on a traditional Inuit pattern.

Sam Christopher Cornwell

Tacky Red Cameras subverts a traditional mode of collection by presenting cameras of a single primary colour in varying conditions.

Sean Griffiths

53:10 is a hanging of 53 doorframes, multiplied in 10 wall-mounted mirrors, forming a meshwork of ever-narrowing and widening passageways.

Shaelene Wynne Murray

Feather is the sculpture of a young woman on the brink of maturity, asking viewers to recognise the wonder of the self that Feather may become.

Susan Phillips

Phillips is interested in the way in which a model or plan can simplify our perception, and can evoke a sense of potential and possibility.

 


Painting, Drawing & Mixed Media

Anna Coburn

Reflections in Blue explores the impact of the elements on an abandoned linen mill. Puddled rain reflects the leaking northlights and sky beyond.

Daniel Mullen

Influenced by Dutch architecture and formalistic, abstract painting, Mullen explores our perception of reality, space and emptiness.

Daniel Rich

Daniel Rich’s paintings point to the shifting of the significance and meaning not only in images of places but the places themselves.

Dorota Borowa

Exploration has always been Borowa’s source of inspiration, looking for a place between reality and abstraction, between accident and design.

Gareth Cadwallader

For Sailor Girl II, Cadwallader’s point of departure was an image from a box of salad showing a smartly dressed man transfixed by a cherry tomato.

Hilary Powell

The featured image is a portrait of Lybomir, one of the invisible workforce who carries out the destruction that goes with urban renewal.

Ian Chamberlain

Chamberlain’s work takes reference from technology and architecture, including structures from industry, agriculture, science and the military.

Ian Robinson

Robinson’s work is influenced by researching in museums and finding objects that portray hidden aspects of the collector’s self-identity.

Jennifer López Ayala

*Shortlisted*
López Ayala investigates the gap between the composition and decomposition of pictures, which results in extraordinary transformations.

Jessie Brennan

Brennan is a London-based British artist whose practice explores the representation of places through drawing and dialogue.

Jo McGonigal

McGonigal addresses how the compositional and material components of painting affect the experiential basis of the viewer.

Josh Rowell

Interested in contemporary simulacra, Rowell has become increasingly concerned with the internet age, exploring the loss of physical reality.

Katherine Anne Rose

Inspired by the patterns we see in our surroundings, from the molecular to the universal scale, Rose creates complex weaving and interlocking shapes.

Lesley Punton

Experiences of metaphorical Northern places, and of gradual movements and shifts have permeated much of Punton’s working process.

Nathan Walsh

Transamerica aims to create a credible and convincing space which, while making reference to our world, displays its own distinct logic.

Patricia Escutia

Page 80 belongs to the Transcriptions series and presents a form of non-language through tri-dimensional abstract writing.

Phil Illingworth

Illingworth’s work frequently (occasionally with tongue-in-cheek) refers to art history: here referencing Van Dyck’s Charles I in three positions.

Sandra Wadkin

They Came By Sea investigates relationships between a physical skin scratched away, and the idea of the displacement of people through history.

Stephen Johnston

Johnston likes to explore the relationship between everyday objects and the figure, which comes to fruition in the self-portrait The Artist.

Val Wecerka

Rather than one single working style, Wecerka’s practice covers an entire spectrum of topics and forms, from figurative to abstract and ornamental.

Yun Nam

What characterises Nam’s series of drawings titled Fensterbilder (Windows) is the sterile depiction of destruction and violence.

 


Video, Installation & Performance

Adam de Neige

For Beneath the Flow, de Neige sank artworks within waterproof boxes and extracted the same amount of sea water as the volume of the cases.

Adriana Salazar

*Shortlisted*
Moving Plant #32 is made from a fallen bamboo branch, which is placed in the gallery and re-animated through external, low-tech mechanisms.

Alexander Nevill

Piccadilly Circus and Williamsburg Bridge uses opposing digital and film projectors to create moving image loops on freestanding central screens.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman

*Shortlisted*
Luka Zimmerman uses fiction and documentary devices to challenge official histories and political, social and economic violence.

Anne Brodie

The Conversation is part of Brodie’s Dead Mother project, making visible the silent, long-term implications of one’s mother’s death.

Baraga

Neunundneunzig (99) consists of 99 balloons, which pays tribute to the anti-nuclear song 99 Luftballons and reflects on post-Cold War Europe.

David Hochgatterer

*Student Prize Winner*
Hochgatterer’s audio installation TIME TO X transforms the fourth dimension, time, into a geometrical expanse.

Diego Fiori & Olga Pohankova

In Fiori and Phankova’s film, the nature of the image is questioned. This work is a tribute and simultaneously a contestation of Jean Cocteau.

Eleni Zevgaridou

Nomatei is an installation of “minumental”, representational portraits capturing body language and a monument to unacknowledged people.

Franko B

Franko B’s Milk & Blood appropriates the aesthetics of boxing, exploring themes of pain, eroticism, revulsion, ecstasy and masculinity.

Gabriella Sonabend

Filmed from a balcony in Bogotá and assembled over the internet, Sonabend’s footage documents a view over a few weeks.

Helena Hamilton

Working both visually and sonically, Hamilton creates at the intersection of interactive computer programming, visual art and sound.

Henry Driver

*Shortlisted*
Odyssey is an interactive installation which questions the definitions of virtual space and the illusory aspects of choice and action within this.

Hermione Spriggs & Curtis Tamm

A Fly Caught in the Eye… is one product of a long, multi-site journey dedicated to the unravelling of Malaise, and its architectural / operative inversion.

Jaeyong Choi

Choi’s film, Light House, addresses the fact that human beings exist as individuals but cannot survive if they are entirely isolated.

Jenn Nkiru

Nkiru’s work focuses on the stories of socially marginalised people, offering a glimpse into worlds and experiences which are not often celebrated.

Kenichi Terabayashi

Form of Memory of Place represents the process of a place which has been listening, memorising and recalling the sound of its own environment.

Leah Miriam Cooper

Experimenting with projection, Cooper seeks to open up the conversation around our identity, from the body to the spaces we choose as individuals.

Liz West

*Shortlisted*
Working across a various mediums, West creates environments that mix luminous colour and light, provoking a heightened sensory awareness.

Lucy Cash

Sight Reading Redux evokes a strange, dream-like sensation of synesthesia through collaging re-enactments of experiments in paroptic vision.

Miriam Gossing & Lina Sieckmann

Desert Miracles meditates upon Nevada’s wedding chapels, considering how the excessive scenery constitutes a cultural organisation of “love”.

Mitra Saboury

Saboury’s work investigates the impact of the built environment on the human body. In Stumbling Block, the artist and environment consume each other.

Nicolas Bernier

Taking the smallest measurable value of energy, as a conceptual basis, frequencies (light quanta) works with the smallness of matter, sound and light.

Rachel Ara

*Main Prize Winner*
This Much I’m Worth is a self-evaluating artwork that continually displays its own sale value, seeking to question the values we place on objects and people.

Ruben van Leer

van Leer is fascinated with the idea of living in a world where human emotions are expressed as dancing geometric structures.

Sali Muller

Muller creates erased photographs, installations and sound-installations, objects and light-objects that address contemporary social issues.

Sean Mullan

Using video, sculpture, sound and their combined associations, Mullan often exercises disruptive processes to generate a form of focus.

Squidsoup

Squidsoup are an international group of artists, researchers and designers working with digital and interactive media experiences.

Tereza Buskova

Inspired by existing facts of past folk practices, Buskova’s work is an exploration of the feelings and fantasies bound up in festive celebrations.

Ting Tong Chang

Chang’s installations challenge the conventional notion of the role of machines in our world, creating a metaphor for a society.

Yiannis Kranidiotis

Pentatono is a kinetic sculpture, where harmony and periodicity are the fundamental elements, forming visual travelling waves and quasi-chaos.