February 2, 2022

Savinder Bual awarded Arts Foundation Futures Award 2022

Jerwood Bursaries artist Savinder Bual is the recipient and Fellow of the £10,000 Arts Foundation Futures Award 2022 for Animation.

The annual Arts Foundation Futures Awards celebrate and support UK artists for their work to date and future development. This year, the new award in Animation explores expanded and experimental animation as art practice. Seeking out bold concepts and innovative uses of this diverse medium, the award supports creatives for whom animation is a key part of their artistic process and means of expression.

Savinder Bual makes kinetic sculptures and moving image works. Her practice references early engineering principles and inventions from the 1800’s. These precursors to cinema include pre-cinematic devices, the steam engine and clock time. Imagining herself as a cinema pioneer, she explores the interplay between the moving and the still, creating works that sit between the pre-cinematic and the digital. By discovering lo-fi ways to add movement to single images and commonplace objects and materials, her intent is to ignite wonder at the illusion of cinema.

Bual was awarded a Jerwood Bursary in the 2020-2021 funding round, which intended to support her to learn new ways of implementing moving parts in her work through a series of bespoke tutorials with kinetic artists and makers.

The 2020-2021 Jerwood Bursary was for artists with 1 to 10 years of professional experience. It provided funding to help artists explore and develop their next steps, whether through supporting skills and knowledge development and/or supporting the first stage development of a new idea.

Established in 1993, the prestigious annual Arts Foundation Futures Awards have become known as a marker for future artistic leaders across wide-ranging art forms. The 2022 awards were presented by category judges: Time-based Media Artist Birgitta Hosea; UCL Professor of Materials & Society and TV and Radio presenter, Mark Miodownik; Folk Singer, Conservationist, and AF Fellow Sam Lee; Artistic Director and CEO of New Art Exchange, Saad Eddine Said; and Visual Artist, Oreet Ashery.

Other nominees across the Arts Foundation Futures Awards categories included Sadé Mica and Shenece Oretha (Survey II), Hannah Tuuliki (Magnetic North) and Eliza Shaddad (Live Work Fund).

Find out more: 

Read about Jerwood Bursaries, here.

Read about Savinder Bual’s work, here.

Read about The Arts Foundation Futures Awards (AFFA) 2022, here.

Savinder Bual, The Pineapple Project, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist