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Artists announced for Jerwood Makers Open 2012
7/Dec/2011
Selected from over 200 applications by Felicity Aylieff, James Beighton and Lauren Parker, we are delighted to announce the five artists selected for Jerwood Makers Open 2012.
Nao Matsunaga, James Rigler, William Shannon, Louis Thompson and Silvia Weidenbach will each receive a £7,500 commission to realise their proposals for new works of craft, which will then be exhibited as part of the JVA programme at at Jerwood Space, London in July 2012 before touring within the UK.
Nao Matsunaga creates raw organic forms from clay, often juxtaposed by wooden and canvas elements. For Jerwood Makers Open, Nao proposes to make large objects that will challenge preconceptions of the small, plinth-top scale one usually associates with ceramics.
James Rigler works with ceramics to explore the idea and the forms of the monument. The commission will allow him to reverse the process of previous work - which employs architectural qualities to give weight to small, everyday objects - and instead make monumental objects that retain an unsettling sense of the domestic and ordinary.
William Shannon will create the last in a series of five works that propose ways in which local materials and localised manufacture can allow new, lightweight industries to be reintroduced to the city. He has designed a 4ft sq workshop to house a working pottery kiln for a fictional tradesman, which can produce real pottery-ware from locally sourced London clay.
Within the visual language of the glass vessel, Louis Thompson is concerned with themes of repetition and sequence, exterior and interior, containment and confinement, glass and solid, perception and illusion. He will use the Jerwood Makers Open commission to explore these themes in blown glass, on an architectural scale.
Silvia Weidenbach is a jewellery maker who, alongside her conventional work, has been experimenting with non-traditional materials and processes such as decomposition and deformation. Using digital technology she has recently begun visualising symmetrical design ideas for these experimental objects, which she now plans to translate back into real pieces which can be worn.
The finished works will be exhibited at JVA at Jerwood Space in July 2012 before touring within the UK.
Download the PRESS RELEASE
Image: Nao Matsunaga, Big Animal or Everything is a Machine, 2011
