Artists’ Profiles 2015

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 2015 longlisted artist, providing insight into their practice.


Photographic & Digital Art

Annina Lingens

In me/copy, Lingens re-enacted other well-known self-portraits, breaking with the traditional understanding of a self-portrait as an authentic expression.

Carolina Redondo

Saltos de Marimán is part of the series Anti-Gravity, which is a result of studies that emerged in the Chilean Pucón, the place of the artist’s childhood.

Cliff Andrade

Andrade works mainly in film and photography, comprising long-form, research-based social documentary landscape and portraiture projects.

Eduards Marks

Marks’s overarching ambition is to represent human visual perception realistically, experimenting with this theme through many diverse fields.

Hagar Vardimon

The starting point of Varidon’s work is built with found photographs and from there placed threads undertake a journey, adding depth & meaning.

Hildegard Weber

Weber’s photo, video, sound installations are distinguished by their use of critical theory, psychological depth and a sense of humour.

Laura Stevens

Sofia, taken from the series Another November, is situated in a nostalgic present where memories are constructed and discoloured.

Lottie Davies

Davies collects stories remembered from long-standing couples, as to how each met the other, asking them to write down their memories.

Mansoureh Pakzad

Last Pose of Life captures the final moments of life acted out by a natural specimen, seeking to engage viewers with extraordinary details of nature.

Marcus Lyon

*Shortlisted*
Lyon is inspired by the resilience of humanity at the edge of existence, with his practice centring on a search for meaning about our universal actions.

Maria Cavali

Although delivering both vague and inconclusive results, Cavali documents heterochromia around the globe and collects stories of individuals.

Maroesjka Lavigne

Travelling through Iceland for four months, the light was bright, colours were vivid, and by the end of Lavigne’s trip the sun kept shining all night long.

Masha Knyazeva-Trotzky 

Confrontation is dedicated to globalisation, up-to-date world processes, emerging conflicts and new values of a post-industrial society.

Mat Hay

True Hunting’s Over was conceived through a desire to develop a free-flowing approach to Hay’s methodology and to push perceived boundaries.

Milja Laurila

Magnetic Sleep takes its title from a psychiatric term and treatment used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, prior to the discovery of hypnotism.

Mohsen Zare

Constructed across 16 archive photographs, Centotaph reflects upon the changing representations of Tehran’s monument, Shahyad Tower.

Olga Woszczyna

Entity III is influenced by the aesthetics of contemporary architecture and goldsmithing, defined by the juxtaposition of various materials.

Rebecca Ruige Xu

Xu reflects upon the dialogues created at the intersection between humanity and technology through visualisation, performance and installation.

Russ Flatt

Swimming pool #1 sits within a series that debates with the notion of identity by looking back to the past in order to recognise the present.

Sarah Smith

Smith’s As the Crow Flies addresses a deeply-held fascination with birds and the complex symbolism and metaphor that surrounds them.

Soyoun Kim

Cadavre Exquis I (meaning “exquisite corpse”) is a montage interpretation of Soyoun Kim’s identity based on personal preference.

Suzanne Mooney

*Student Prize Winner*
For 10 years, Mooney has observed and experimented with landscape, from the scenery of her home country, Ireland, to less familiar terrains.

Suzanne Moxhay

Copse is developed by combining fragments of collected imagery, ranging from photographs and prints in old magazines to painted elements.

Todd Antony

Whilst shooting Sun City Poms, Antony thought about the American obsession with ageing, from child beauty pageants to those striving to hold back the years.

 


Three Dimensional Design & Sculpture

Anna Kime

Lacuna – meaning an unfilled space, a gap, an extended silence or depression – is a once-thrown piece that rests and melts with hidden pools.

Antonios Chalyvidis

Using coarse materials and methods, Chalyvidis produces kinetic structures and mechanisms to generate sound, movement and rhythm.

Ben Eggleton

Commenting on dementia, the figures’ welded encasement suggests the sufferers’ physical and mental entrapment within themselves.

Bozena Hanna Kaluga

The Power of Beginning is a sculpture created with a 3D printing pen, which allowed the artist to produce a layered structure which interacts with light.

Bruce Aitken

Inspired by long case clocks, Aitken makes weight-driven, pendulum-regulated clocks: rotating wooden wheels controlled by gravity.

Conor McDonald

To Find is Never Found began with the found object and considered its effect on the ubiquity of abstract language.

Flavio Senoner

Sonny Moved White Oblongs is made from plaster and wood – specifically, burnt wood, which is a material with unusual characteristics.

Hannah Honeywill

Using existing objects, Honeywill makes sculptures, including Unfunction / Function, that come with their own narratives and histories.

Hollie Mackenzie

Mackenzie investigates the deconstruction of Phallogocentrism; in which the artist proposes to form a “labial/rhizomatic” way of thinking.

Jasmine Targett

What the eyes do not see demonstrates how observation challenges the way we understand the world, and how thinking about it changes what we see.

Jason deCaires Taylor

de Caires Taylor’s work focuses on the dramatic decline of the world’s reef systems and the ways in which artificial reefs can increase marine biomass.

Jennifer Claire Still

The defining word for Still’s artwork is “growth”, always searching for unique objects in order to construct one-of-a-kind sculptures.

John Hollington

Elica Pendant Light utilises conceptual sketching and 3D modelling to create contemporary structures which encompass shape, colour and form.

Julian Day

*Shortlisted*
Requiem is a self-contained sculpture suspended between walls: two identical synthesizers pinned apart by metal rods which create a drone field.

Julian Voss-Andreae

The central driving force behind all of Voss-Andreae’s work, in art as well as in science, is a deep curiosity and a passion for nature.

Larisse Hall

Flirt abstracts the language of relationships and considers both our gregarious, social behaviour and more intimate states.

Lesley Hilling

Stoneflower is a three-dimensional collage built from floorboards, driftwood and aged furniture that have been re-worked into new forms.

Marijke de Goey

de Goey’s sculpture, Curly Burly, investigates the symbiotic relationship between sculptures and the wider contexts of their surroundings.

Marion Delarue

Blue Agate Bracelet stems from Delarue’s interest in the notions of imitations and counterfeits, particularly those created to meet people’s needs.

Nathaniel Foley

F-111 Aardvark consists of cones that are integrated with spires and held together under tension, supported by utilitarian containers (crates).

Owen Waterhouse

*Shortlisted*
Waterhouse strives to construct objects that are beautiful, useful and intriguing, using technology to create and the develop sculptural forms.

Patricia Mato-Mora

Untitled occupies a seemingly empty area through suspended clay forms, which buckle and blister organically along its vertical support.

Sanitas Pradittasnee

Questioning social systems and civilisation, Pradittasenee is intrigued by the notion of being and non-being as demonstrated in KHOA MO

Sara Umar

Visible political constructs and the presence of hidden violence and fictitious narrative in present-day warfare underpin Umar’s practice.

Seree Kang

Illuminated by a single spotlight, the elevated texts of Visual Perception in Typography cast ambiguous forms across gallery walls.

Sungmin Park

In Uninhabited Island individuals sit alone and are locked up in their own world; contemplating their own universe inside geometric units.

Tiago Valente

Dystonia is an exploration of human identity that manifests alter egos and their internal circumstances among theatrical environments.

 


Painting, Drawing & Mixed Media

Brigitte Körber

Körber paints objects of a technical nature by making use of uncommon perspectives, colours or relationships to create a narrative arrangement.

Chiang Lup Hong

Imaginary Landscape 01 is one of many fictitious landscapes, featuring a composition of various natural forms and layers of paper collages.

Dana Ariel

Black Shed stems from the need to understand the conflicting definitions within Ariel’s own identity and the contradicting legacies she inherited.

Edwina Bracken

‘a priori’ is a work in two parts and explores the cognitions of painting, addressing the dialogues played out between artwork and spectator.

Emi Avora

So Close So Far Apart II was made for an installation at the National Theatre of Greece, and depicts the interior of Greece’s Presidential Mansion.

Emilie Pugh

In Cloud Root Pugh used 30 layers of incense burnt rice paper to convey a sense of shifting forms, challenging the idea of an anchored moment.

Felicita Norris

Not White Enough probes the subconscious, reinterpreting innocence and desire, and casting the viewer as both voyeur and participant.

Frances Bloomfield

Bloomfield’s principal concern is in examining the parallel realities that we inhabit: worlds and shadow worlds and the interplay between them.

Gareth Jenkins

The architectonic and geometrical nature of P.Y.B references qualities of the built environment and the everyday infrastructure.

Ian St. John

Found imagery from the 1970s and 1980s, typically from advertisements or photographs recalling a pre-digital age are the basis of John’s practice.

John Keane

*Main Prize Winner*
Sourced from mug shots of arrested victims, Keane’s paintings draw on images from the great Stalinist terror of the 1930s.

Margery Amdur

Creating pieces both tactile and visual, Amdur works in a purposefully low-tech way in a high-tech world, traversing multiple disciplines.

Maria Hinze

Through structural exploration, o.T. surveys the dominant themes of presence and permeability, invisibility and disappearance.

Michele Del Campo

Part of an ongoing series, Del Campo’s The Other Side depicts isolation, loneliness and degradation of society and the environment.

Neil Douglas

Council Blossoms is part of a collection of work that portrays the beauty and decay of urban landscapes in the neighbourhoods of London.

Patrizio Sanguigni

Patrizio Sanguigni’s work Untitled is a study of decoration in oil and tempera on canvas that highlights the importance of perspective.

Rebeka Lord

Based on the idea that individuals perceive the same objects in diverse ways, Lord examines perception in her work Send Me On My Way.

Saliha Elhoussaini

*Shortlisted*
Inspired by complex relationships found in Chaos Theory, Elhoussaini’s drawings reflect the interconnected universe of natural & man-made systems.

Thomas Cameron

Drawn to the aesthetic of the snapshot, everyday scenes that go unnoticed through their apparent familiarity are the starting point for Cameron.

Will Turner

Taking stock of the immediate environment; banal, bleak and comforting, Turner creates objects made of gestural lines.

Zoe Beaudry

Beaudry is fascinated by the fetish-like power of relics in the Roman Catholic Church, and traditions involving consumption or asceticism.

 


Video, Installation & Performance

Alexandra Charlotte Pullen

Through an intricate web of objects, drawings and words, Pullen hopes we might reflect upon their place within any number of worlds and realities.

Alexandra Vacaroiu

My favourite memory I didn’t have a photograph of is a series of images and interviews with participants, some of whom are suffering from memory loss.

Annina Roescheisen

What Are You Fishing For? acts as a metaphor for youth; the piece plunges viewers into the heart of the union between a young man and woman.

Cecilia Stenbom

Media-saturated, consumer-driven everyday environments are the source material for Cecilia Stenborn’s work, entitled SYSTEM.

Denys Blacker

Blacker examines the properties of the gases while looking for their relationship to everyday life, subjective reality and collective experiences.

Gavin Murphy

Taking a demolished Modernist building and the lost work of its designer as its subjects, Murphy’s film is concerned with the notion of “being out of date.”

Jason Covert

Excavation is an ultra-personal journey through one man’s fears and psychic wounds. It is meant to read like a mirror, addressing universal issues.

Joomi Chung

Based on the Deleuzian idea of rhizome, Chung’s work investigates a form that emerges from a process of drawing ideas in three-dimensional space.

José Ramón da Cruz

Madre Quentina is an audiovisual composition in six acts with an epilogue. Ultimately, it is a work dedicated to all those who observe you.

Kenta Nakagawa

The concept of Nakagawawa’s work is a space-experiment for architecture. It raised several questions: What is architecture? What is an inner space?

Linda Ingham

Ingham has an enthusiasm for techniques and materials which aid her investigations into ideas surrounding time and the human condition.

London Fieldworks (Bruce Gilchrist & Jo Joelson)

The Remote Performances project was a week of radio art broadcast live from Outlandia, an artists’ field station in Glen Nevis, Scotland.

Lorenza Ippolito

Seed to Seed is a 20-minute film that uses seeds as a metaphor to analyse the links between biodiversity (the seed) and cultural diversity (identity).

Lorenzo Gattorna

Gattorna’s films converge the avant-garde and documentary modes of cinema, swaying between direct observation and speculative fiction.

Matt Parker

*Shortlisted*
The Cloud is More Than Air and Water surveys the physical locations of “The Cloud”, capturing the unique acoustic footprint of the internet.

Matthias Tharang

Primarily working in installation and moving image, the main intention of Tharang’s practice is to challenge patterns of perception.

Michelle Hannah

There is a strong sense of romanticism in Hannah’s work, mainly in the ways in which sound, performance and film are used as an outlet.

Noémie Goudal

In Tanker and Diver, Goudal explores the fine line between reality and fiction, featuring ambiguous repetitive performances in over-scale landscapes.

Noora Geagea

Movement and the way in which it exposes the presence of power structures in everyday life are the driving forces of Geagea’s video.

Olga Pohankova & Diego Fiori

1+1=UNA MÁS moves from logical space to the logic of the space. The horizon line is rotated by 180°, breaking and short-circuiting the image.

Rachel McBrinn & Alison Piper

Inspired by ways in which digital and physical cultures merge, A Lower Volume offers an immersive and illusory journey through liquid and light.

Sangjin Kim

Kim has made use of language, sound, machines and time in order to create a means of representing the problematic points of how humans interact.

Shen Xin

Xin is interested in the “othering” of minorities in relation to aesthetics & economies and is drawn to the potential of forming natural connections.

Somer Meijer

In I Just Want To Know You / Intensive Care one person wants to know everything about the other and precisely measures their entire body.

Stephen Hendee

Hendee’s The Last People analyses form building, which is influenced by digital methodologies and makes use of ordinary materials.

Tsuyoshi Anzai

For Tsuyoshi Anzai, machines are things that are beyond control. This idea is one of the key motifs in Sweet Dreams.

Vera Drebusch

*Shortlisted*
In Preservation, Drebusch has made jam from fruits that grew in Bonn, Germany, but on the grounds of the embassies of Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Yardena Kurulkar

The materials of choice in Kurulkar’s 5 Seconds Later – water and clay – bring associations with a range of religious customs and beliefs.