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| Sarah Ball - Gang member IV |
I was privileged to be a selector for Welsh Artist of the Year 2013 this year, along with artist and broadcaster, Richard Huw Morgan, painter, Neale Howells, Ceramicist, Christine Jones and St David's Gallery Exhibition Officer, Ruth Cayford. Today the awards ceremony was held at St David's Hall in Cardiff.
The winner, painter Sarah Ball was for me a clear contender from
the start. The diminutive size of her skilfully made portraits bring a powerful
intensity to her work and echo the photographs from which they were sourced (often
from police records and museum archives).
They have the slightly unsettling presence of subjects in a rogues’
gallery. Isolated from the background paraphernalia of life, like mug shots or
passport photos, the faces and titles alone must tell you their story. They
have a ghost-like quality which reminds us of the very function of a portrait,
to capture a fleeting, living moment and hold it still for our gaze forever. Peering
in to the fine details, as you must to appreciate these pieces, you are drawn in
to imagine the circumstances and stories that might lie behind the image.
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| John Abell - Three Graces: All the Floods Left Them |
The runner-up this
year was also a very strong voice in the mix. John Abell is a young print-maker
of exuberant talents – he describes himself on his blog as ‘…artist, vagabond and
part-time dandy ’and that energy and swagger is apparent in his large-scale
woodcuts. Like Sarah Ball, he is telling stories but the techniques could not
be more different, Abell’s work is audaciously vigorous and bold. The materials
he uses to make his printing plates are scavenged and makeshift bringing an
edgy immediacy to an ancient technique.
David Barnes received
the photography prize this year for his image Swan. Again we are invited to engage with implied
story telling through his cleverly realised compositions and subjects which
often hint at nefarious or marginal antics and exchanges but also bring into
play sophisticated subtexts of visual language.
There are two
sculpture prizes this year, for quite different pieces of work. Sean Olsen's
intriguing robot Paint-Bot V-2 which we imagine might create its own strange artworks – it
has the dormant quality of a ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ that might be snapped into
life at any moment. Jonathan Anderson’s glossy, black ‘Dark Anomaly’ is a departure
from his often-used material of coal-dust, bringing a raw edge to his sculpture
that simultaneously talks about the beauty and mystery of the infinite cosmos
and the lumpen materiality and insatiable consumption of human beings.
We were spoiled for
choice with ceramics this year with a very strong submission of exceptional
work, the winner, Morgen Hall surprised us with her new collection of soda fired porcelain tapas
dishes that could as easily be sculptural objects as functional ceramic ware.
The drawing prize,
awarded to Iwan Bala recognised the media and techniques he has used in his
work on paper. There is a distinct sense of materiality, with the rough
textures and the use of drawing implements and washes to create this and his
other distinctive works. Bala is known for the political and polemical content of
his work, but this prize also acknowledges the artistic choices in their
making.
A photograph by
Patricia Zaid won the Student Prize and takes a quite traditional subject
of a chapel interior bringing a timeless poignancy and atmospheric quality to the image.
Four artists were highly commended, Jin Eui Kim for his ceramic piece Object No. 8, Jo Berry for her painting, Untitled, Jonathan Williams for his photograph, Home is not where you live, but where they understand you and Angharad Pearce Jones' for her sculpture triptych Disc Cutter Landscapes.
