Two new moving-image commissions by early-career artists Lucy Clout and Marianna Simnett in response to the curatorial theme “What Will They See of Me?”.
Lucy Clout’s work, From Our Own Correspondent, considers how the rolling deadlines and insistent demands of round-the-clock news reporting are making their presence felt. Trained to put their subject first and their personal opinions second, today’s journalists are also finding (like so many of us) that work is dominating life as a whole. Filmed in a series of anonymous hotel rooms, as if to show how the line between home and work is becoming ever more blurred, Clout’s video combines interviews with writers, bloggers and other media figures with moments of reverie and fantasy.
Marianna Simnett’s work, Blood, has the unsettling familiarity of a fairytale. Continuing the artist’s fascination with childhood rites of passage, it pivots around the young protagonist Isabel, following a surgical procedure to her nose. Alternating between the confines of her sickbed and the mountain landscapes of Albania, the film is punctuated by enigmatic scenes in which Isabel is both shadowed and protected by Lali, an Albanian sworn virgin. Lali’s disavowal of her biological sex causes Isabel to question her own path to adulthood, considering how identity is not always in the blood but increasingly in our own hands
The two artists were selected from a list of over 150 submissions in response to open call to UK artists within the first five years of establishing their practice. Each artist received a bursary of £4,000 and production support from FVU, in order to develop pre-production proposals for new works.
Selectors: artist Ed Atkins, previously selected for the first edition of the Awards; Steven Bode, Director of Film and Video Umbrella; Shonagh Manson, Director of Jerwood Charitable Foundation; Francis McKee, Director of CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; Sarah Williams, Jerwood Visual Arts Gallery Manager; and Catherine Wood, Curator of Contemporary Art & Performance at Tate Modern.
The Jerwood/FVU Awards are a major annual opportunity for moving-image artists run in partnership by Jerwood Charitable Foundation and FVU. They were established in 2012 in response to a need for significant major commissions for early-career moving-image artists at an unproven stage in their practice, and contribute to an ongoing dialogue around urgent or timely concerns within moving image through the curatorial theme, which changes each year. Alumni include Ed Atkins, Corin Sworn, Emma Hart and Marianna Simnett.
