The Jerwood/Photoworks Awards are a major commissioning opportunity supporting early-career artists working with photography to make ambitious new work and significantly develop their practice at a pivotal moment in their career.
Awardees Heather Agyepong and Joanne Coates will premiere their new commissions in a two-person exhibition at Jerwood Space in London which opens to the public on 23 September 2022.
Heather Agyepong
London-based Heather Agyepong is developing ego death, a project inspired by psychiatrist Carl Jung’s concept of ‘The Shadow’. According to Jung, the shadow is composed of aspects of one’s personality deemed inappropriate, that have been shamed and repressed, generally during childhood and adolescence, by family, education, social norms, and other external factors. Heather has recently been working to discover and explore her own shadow; confronting and making peace with it through this body of work. Heathers’ art practice is concerned with mental health and wellbeing, invisibility, the diaspora, and the archive. She uses both lens-based practices and performance with an aim to culminate a cathartic experience for both herself and the viewer.
Joanne Coates
Yorkshire-based photographer Joanne Coates is creating The Lie of the Land, a body of work that explores the social history of the land and narrates a story of gender and class that has long been forgotten – or simply never told – in relation to the countryside of the Northeast. Joanne works at the intersection of socially engaged practice and traditional British documentary photography, fusing them together in a creative visual language that combines landscape, portraits, still image, and non-photographic elements such as sound. For this commission, Joanne has collaborated with twelve women who identify as working class, living and working in rural or agricultural settings, to develop a series of portraits that represent their individual lived experience. She explores rurality, social histories of class, and inequalities relating to low income through photography, installations, and audio.
The two artists were chosen by a panel, made up of Christine Eyene (Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Liverpool John Moores University and Research Curator at Tate Liverpool), Joy Gregory (artist), Sunil Gupta (photographer), Julia Bunnemann (Curator, Photoworks) and Harriet Cooper (Head of Visual Arts, Jerwood Arts). During selection, the panel were unanimously impressed by both artists’ powerful proposals which address important current issues while representing a pivotal opportunity for experimentation and development for the artists’ own photographic practice.
Previous recipients of the Jerwood/Photoworks Award include: Silvia Rosi, Theo Simpson, Alejandra Carles-Tolra, Sam Laughlin, Lua Ribeira, Matthew Finn, Joanna Piotrowska and Tereza Zelenkova.
The Jerwood/Photoworks Awards are a collaboration between Jerwood Arts and Photoworks, supported by Spectrum Photographic. The exhibition and events will be the final presentation at Jerwood Space before Jerwood Arts commence their new strategy to support the visual arts from 2023.
Find out more
Read the full press release, here.
Find out more about the upcoming Jerwood/Photoworks Awards exhibition, here.
Read about past additions of the Awards, here.
