Jerwood Arts and Photoworks present new commissions by Heather Agyepong and Joanne Coates, awardees of the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 4.
Now in its fourth edition, the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards are a major commissioning opportunity supporting early-career artists working with photography to make new work and significantly develop their practice. The awardees were selected from over 370 applications to a national call for entries and will realise ambitious new works over a 12 months period for a national touring exhibition which is currently on show in London at Jerwood Space.
Heather Agyepong’s ego death is 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. Agyepong has recently been working to discover and explore her own shadow; confronting, and making peace with it through this body of work.
Joanne Coates’ The Lie of the Land is 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 North East of England. For this commission, she 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 experiences.
Selectors: 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). Applicants were longlisted prior to the final panel meeting by staff from Photoworks and Jerwood Arts, along with members of ReFramed, a Midlands-based network for Black, Asian and people of colour interested in producing photographic visual art.
The Jerwood/Photoworks Awards are a collaboration between Jerwood Arts and Photoworks, supported by print partner Spectrum Photographic. Previous recipients have included Silvia Rosi, Theo Simpson, Alejandra Carles-Tolrá, Sam Laughlin, Lua Ribeira, Matthew Finn, Joanna Piotrowska, and Tereza Zelenkova.
Find out more about the past editions of the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards, here.
