Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 1

New black and white photographic works by three early career artists, Matthew Finn, Joanna Piotrowska and Tereza Zelenkova, enabled by the first national, biennial Jerwood/Photoworks Awards.

Matthew Finn has made collaborative portraits of his mother since 1987 and his work offers an intense and honest view of the mother-son bond. In this new series of works mother Jean’s role changes from active to passive subject as a result of her deteriorating mental health.

Joanna Piotrowska’s work explores anxiety and the effects of global and political events on the individual. This new series of photographs offers a reclamation of the private body from the public sphere. Seeking to counteract the passive role often encouraged of adolescent women and girls, the works picture them re-creating poses from self-defence manuals in a domestic setting.

Tereza Zelenkova’s work for this exhibition explores the poetics of landscape and the stories tied to it. Depicting places of history and folklore in her native Czech Republic, the images use symbolism and atmosphere to trace a subjective image of place. Tereza departs from the common history of these locations and begins to create a personal and ambiguous landscape mythology that the viewer is invited to decipher.