I am excited to announce I have been awarded an Artists Respond grant by St Hugh’s Foundation for the Arts. In August 2020, the foundation announced that it would be making 8 grants of £750 available to artists in the City of Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire (including North and North East Lincolnshire). The aim of the grants was to enable selected artists to engage with their practice in whatever form felt most relevant at this challenging time, without the need to produce something at the end. Following some lockdown experimentation using limited and leftover materials in the studio, the grant will be used to further explore making small decorative tiles artworks at home, to install around the city of Hull. The decorative interventions will be based on my own designs as well as locally sourced patterns found hidden in the city’s architecture. They can be made in isolation, installed individually, and have their locations sourced online with the public - making the project viable during ever-changing Covid-19 restrictions.
If you own a public-facing wall - whether it a residential or business property - and would be interested in owning and installing a small decorative artwork (for free!), please get in touch using my online contact form. Please include a postcode and picture of your property so it can assessed for suitability and also for planning fair distribution across Hull. Updates about the project will be posted on my instagram and mailing list (sign up at the bottom of my website.) Due to the volume of interest, I will be in touch only with chosen properties once the tiles are complete. Please note due to limited funding, tiles may require self-installation and are for decorative purposes only. The overall aims of the installations is to invoke curiosity and provide a little joy to the public going about their daily routines, creating a moment to enjoy and appreciate the smaller decorative aspects of their everyday surroundings. The core themes of my work are pattern and folk-art - these accessible art forms have been present in societies for centuries as ways to communicate, celebrate occasions, and create a sense of identity. Whilst pattern continues to thrive as contemporary societies' everyday art from, adorning every possible surface in our homes and clothes, the appearance of our streets are dictated by authorities and developers who create environments with little creativity, colour or joy. I work in the public realm to explore these themes and use murals as an artform which is accessible to all. With murals currently postponed, the grant is an opportunity to play and explore with a new medium.
“It was important to us to offer something that might enable artists to get back to their practice at this incredibly difficult and uncertain time” describes Katie Green, Chair of the St Hugh’s Foundation for the Arts. “The quality and range of applications we received from across our area of benefit made the decision-making process very challenging, because we could appreciate the devastating impact the pandemic has had on so many artists and the extent of the need for funding and support. It was hard to only select 8 artists to receive Artists Respond funding at this time, and we hope that we can find ways to support more in the coming months.”
Details about future award programmes will be published online at https://www.sthughsfoundation.co.uk.
Find out about the other recipient of the Artist Respond awards here.