The Latitude Contemporary Art Award

Now in its third year, the Latitude Contemporary Art (LCA) Award and Exhibition boasts one of the largest contemporary art prize funds in the country. This year’s shortlist of five British artists have been selected and commissioned to compete for the £10,000 prize and an invitation to return in 2013 with a challenging new art work. The final pieces of art will be exhibited within the Iris Gallery, a dedicated woodland site at the heart of the festival.

Alongside creating artworks for the festival, the artists will also take part in a number of Q&A sessions in front of a festival audience. We hope you can make it to the festival to take part in these discussions yourself and in preparation we have put together a round-up of this year’s shortlisted artists; what they’ve been doing recently and what they will be creating for the LCA.

Linder

Linder is an artist and musician whose early career was forged in the punk and post-punk scenes of Manchester in the 1970s, where her influence and involvement in these circles manifested itself broadly in music, performance, publishing and art. Her collages, which juxtapose images from consumer and porn magazines, were seminal in their use by bands Buzzcocks and Magazine for their record sleeves.

Her most recent solo exhibition was at Stuart Shave/Modern Art (2011) and her thirteen hour performances of The Darktown Cakewalk: Celebrated from the House of FAME at The Arches in Glasgow (Sorcha Dallas Gallery) and at London’s Chisenhale Gallery (2010). Linder’s film Forgetful Green, which features characters from her performances, was commissioned for Ch4/Frieze Film in 2010, with Tim Walker as cinematographer and costumes by Richard Nicoll. In January 2013 Linder will have a retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, and is collaborating with Northern Ballet to create a new work which will premier there.

Linder’s piece for the LCA is Stringed Figure (Octobass for the 21st Century) (Version I). Historically, the octobass is a larger version of the double bass and there are at most only four octobasses in the world, two of them were created in the late eighteenth century and are now in museums in Paris and the US. Recently two octobasses have been recreated in Europe, following the eighteenth century tradition. Linder’s Octobass for the 21st Century departs radically in form and structure from its predecessors; it is far more sculptural and minimal. The lowest notes created by the octobass are inaudible to the human ear, the sound is experienced viscerally in the body. At LCA the octobass will be played away from the confines of the concert hall and will be located within the woodlands, a sonic Genius Loci.

George Young

Shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2010, recent solo exhibitions include Hilary Crisp Gallery, London (2012) and WE-Project Gallery, Brussels (2010). He is also currently participating in group exhibitions Merging Bridges at the Museum of Modern Art in Azerbaijan and Out of Sight, Out of Mind at the Workplace Gallery in Gateshead. George’s creation for the LCA, Treasure Trove, is a new sculpture made from an amalgamation of recently stolen bronzes by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, reproduced in lightweight materials (polystyrene and jesmonite). The original sculptures were stolen for scrap metal, rather than for their greater artistic or commercial value. Re-fabricating these sculptures explores how we value public sculpture and how this value changes over time through economic and cultural flux.

Lisa Peachey

In 2008 Lisa was shortlisted for the MaxMara art prize, in association with the Whitechapel Art Gallery. She has also curated projects, including In Its Wake, at Elevator Gallery, London, and has written texts for Moot, Nottingham and Site Gallery, Sheffield. Previous exhibitions include Small is Beautiful, Flowers Central, London (2011), Abort, Retry, Fail?, South Square Gallery, Bradford (2011), Artist of the Day, Flowers Central, London (2011), and the Jerwood Drawing Prize, London (2006). Lisa will also be appearing at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition this year. Her work for the LCA takes the Claude Glass, an optical instrument widely popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, towards the architectural, as the centrepiece of a flatplan that mimics a simplistic architecture. Made of wood, the glass reflects its surroundings in material as well as in image. Inspired by the story of an Italian ceiling once in existence at Henham Hall, the work re-instates the inherent duality of architecture and nature as a locked and endless coupling.

Tom Dale

Tom was recently named the Guardian’s ‘Artist of the Week’ with writing about his work appearing in Flash Art, Art Review, Time Out, and Dazed & Confused. In 2008 he was a recipient of an ACE grant for the arts, supporting his first international solo exhibition at the CCA Warsaw and subsequent publication. A Graduate of the Goldsmiths Fine Art MA course in 2006, he currently holds a doctoral research position at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Tom’s current commissions which have just opened include the Banquet of Sound at Ham House in Richmond, London and The Mars Society, in the Tatton Park Biennial. In 2013/2014 Tom will be part of a Hayward Gallery Touring show Curiosity curated by the writer and critic Brian Dillon. His LCA commission is a double first for him in that it’s his first twelve metre high sculpture and his first invisible sculpture.

Andy Holden

Andy won the Slade School of Fine Art Boise Travel Scholarship in 2008 and a Grant for the Arts from Arts Council. He also became a Stanley Picker Fellowship member at Kingston University in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include The Dan Cox Library for the Unfinished Concept of Thingly Time, Cubitt , Stalagmite Rock Club, Art Rotterdam (2012), Cookham Erratics, Bristol, Chewy Cosmos Thingly Time, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Cookham Erratic, Benaki Museum, Athens (2011) and Art Now: Andy Holden, TATE Britain (2010). Andy is also currently developing a play, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men; an adaptation of the book by David Foster Wallace that will be staged at the ICA in London in August, then touring to Glasgow and Bristol. In 2013 he will be participating in the Hayward Touring exhibition; The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, which is curated by Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey. Andy’s LCA creation is a piece titled Unquiet Grave, a wooden monument to the megaphone.

Latitude 2012, 12/07/2012 until 15/07/2012, Henham Park, Southwold, Suffolk. www.latitudefestival.co.uk