Mother Art Prize 2022 Winners and Show finalists
12 January 2023
Mother Art Prize 2022, finalists and awards winners
We are excited to finally announce the finalists of the Mother Art Prize 2022 edition.
21 artists among 630 entries from 36 countries have been selected this year by:
Dr. Charlotte Bonham-Carter (Independent curator and writer, and Head of International Partnerships, CCW), Niamh Coghlan (Director of Richard Saltoun Gallery), Pauline de Souza (Director of the Diversity Art Forum), Caroline Douglas (Director at the Contemporary Art Society), Touria El Glaoui (Director of 1-54 art fair).
Finalists Artists are:
Their work will be part of a multidisciplinary group show at the Zabludowicz Collection starting on the 31st of March until the 25th of June 2023. It brings together poignant works exploring themes encompassing gender biases, care, bodies, and migration, creating tension and conversation between history, contemporary lives, and the future.
Individual awards:
The Commission Award was won by Ming Ying Hong, Rhode Island, USA ( £1000 for the production of a new work commissioned in partnership with the Diversity Art Forum. This award is dedicated to people of colour, black or brown and mixed-race artists)
Ming Ying Hong’s work explores hybridized bodies, examining the way we define, categorize, and assign power to them. Recognizable forms are fragmented, defamiliarized, and remixed to create an uncanny hodgepodge of forms that were previously magnetically opposed to one another. The work encourages us to examine the in-between spaces of these binaries—the spaces that fall outside of our clear-cut definitions and hierarchies.
Online Award won by Qian Qian, London, UK (online Solo Exhibition with Richard Saltoun Gallery).
Highlighting the dysfunctionality of language, misunderstanding as precedent to understanding, individual articulation of truth and culture hybridity through translation, the artist discusses these themes with her ambient interactive paper sound installation, visual imagery and poetry. Embracing mankind in a phenomenological sense, Qian Qian’s work awakens the (human) spirits through constructed situations and empathised material. Relations are automatically generated where there are humans and as a type of psychological acknowledgement, spiritual being can be created therefrom.
International Award won by Mee Jey, St. Louis, USA (Up to 1-month Residency at the Mother House Studios in London with mentoring sessions with Sylvie Gormezano)
Mee Jey ‘s work is concerned with the lived experience. Quotidian activities, quests and discoveries are fundamental to her art. Her changing understanding of what it means to be an immigrant is accompanied by the newfound concerns of being a mother. It is thus no surprise that works deeply embedded in cultural and personal experience are also politically charged.
Along with this interweaving of political and personal subjects and Indian cultural knowledge with American material, Mee Jey often engages with the tension between history and contemporary life.
The Mother Art Prize is the only international prize for self-identifying women and non-binary visual artists with caring responsibilities.
This platform aims to promote and support artists with caring responsibilities, as well as to drive the attention of the wider public to a broad-spectrum of themes that would otherwise be overlooked and devalued, embracing the risk necessary to achieve a sea change in the perception and normalisation of women and carers’ artistic output as part of the cultural landscape.
“Procreate Project is a vitally important space that supports and champions artists who are carers, (m)others or parents. Procreate Project understands the elastic fragility of what it means to make and show artwork, at the same time as having competing caring responsibilities. At this very surreal and anxious time that we are all living through, spaces like this are extremely rare and extra special, so I am very grateful to Procreate Project and the Mother Art Prize for existing and supporting our work.” – Helen Benigson, Mother Art Prize 2020 Winner
Violet Costello 'Bringing Home Baby' at Richard Saltoun
Violet COSTELLO:
Bringing Home Baby
15 September – 31 October 2020
Saltoun Online: Women 2.0
‘Bringing Home Baby’ is an online presentation by Violet COSTELLO, winner of the 2020 ‘Procreate Project – Mother Art Prize Online Award’. Featuring new paintings and works on paper created over the last two years, the exhibition marks the first show in a commercial gallery context for the artist. It launches as part of Richard Saltoun Gallery’s Women 2.0 series, a new programme of online exhibitions presenting work by non-represented artists with the aim of providing an additional platform and visibility for women artists.
The work of Violet Costello is inspired by the complexities of the human condition: our quirks and familiarities, our moments of loneliness and moments of joy, the ways in which we identify and represent ourselves in and to the world. With a practice incorporating painting, sculpture and installation, Costello explores the home, familial relations and society’s ability to shape identity. A common thread in much of her work has been the consideration of children’s world of play, a realm where reality readily gives way to, and is confused with, imagination – as can be seen in her ambitious series Bringing Home Baby.
The paintings in Bringing Home Baby depict the meeting of innocent babyhood with prevailing, if idiosyncratic, culture. In each work, a baby is confronted by the foreign and intensely detailed culture of a family home: Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch on the floor or the 1970s American sitcom Flying Nun on TV; two men happily knitting; a sunburnt dad barbecuing; a bejewelled mom sunbathing; a blue teen in angst; a tattooed mother in a swim cap; and a buttoned-up father in a monkey hat. The walls are hung with art: a Basquiat, a black velvet nude, a Klimt, a bullfighter. The absurd, dreamlike quality of these domestic scenes evokes the strangeness of a baby’s new world and is suggestive of the complex processes by which culture defines and imposes the identity that will shape a baby’s life.
The online presentation is part of the Procreate Project – Mother Art Prize, where Costello was awarded the Online Award for three paintings in her Bringing Home Baby series: Holiday Inn, Peek Freans and Touch Him (all 2018). In addition to these paintings, and several more made specifically for the show, Costello will debut new works on paper, including sketches for works in Bringing Home Baby, such as Wieners, Art in America and Three Cats (all 2020), as well as a loose, auto-biographical self-portrait from her Meseries.
“Among 626 entries from 45 countries, selected by an incredible line up of judges, Violet Costello was the undoubted winner of the Mother Art Prize 2020 Online Award. Violet’s works reimagine figurative art into an engaging new language that combines imagination, play and the grotesque. Costello offers interesting new narratives around the idea of family, care and socio-cultural imprints. As directors of an organisation that promotes and investigates themes surrounding the maternal experience and identity, Violet is definitely an exciting discovery and we look forward to working with her in the future,” said Dyana Gravina, Founder and Creative Director, Procreate Project.
Born in Morpeth, England in 1957, Costello moved to Canada as a child at the age of four. Costello studied at the Alberta College of Art before transferring to the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, where she graduated with an honours diploma in 3-Dimensional Studies and received the J.W. McConnell Memorial Fellowship upon graduation. Costello later earned an MFA in sculpture from Concordia University in Montreal. She has taught at Concordia and the University of Saskatchewan. Costello has been on the rosters of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Calgary Arts Partners in Education Society (CAPES) and the City of Calgary Public Art Program. She has received awards from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, British Columbia Culture and Canada Council. Her large-scale sculptural installations have been exhibited throughout Canada in solo and group shows at venues including Latitude 53 Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta; Western Front Gallery, Vancouver, B.C.; Devonian Art Gallery, Calgary, Alberta; and AKA Gallery, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; amongst others.
The 2020 Mother Art Prize judging panel included: Niamh Coghlan, Director, Richard Saltoun Gallery; Pauline de Souza, Director, Diversity Art Forum; Elvira Dyangani Ose, Director, The Showroom, London and Lecturer, Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University; Eva Langret, Artistic Director, Frieze London; Claire Mander, Chair of Steering Committee of UK Friends of the National Museum of Women in the Arts and Director, theCoLAB; and Frances Morris, Director, Tate Britain. The 2020 edition featured three prize categories: the Winner’s Award, including a £500 Cash Prize and two week solo exhibition at The Showroom in summer 2021; an International Award, including a four week residency at the White House Dagenham (in partnership with Create London) and £500 worth of art materials sponsored by Colart; and an Online Award, including an online exhibition with Richard Saltoun Gallery and two mentoring sessions with Sylvie Gormezano, Director, Picture This Productions and the Chair of the Association of Women Art Dealers (AWAD).
Gallery information
Opening hours:
Please visit the gallery’s website for the latest opening hours
Participating Artists:
Mother Art Prize Exhibition 2020 Cromwell Place
Procreate Project is thrilled to present a group exhibition featuring 19 short-listed artists of the Mother Art Prize 2020, the only international prize for self-identifying women and non-binary visual artists with caring responsibilities.
Established and curated by Procreate Project, this prize’s edition puts together the most exciting leaders and organisations working to tackle the gender bias and intersectional issues in the art scene.
Featuring artists that work across a range of media, the works were selected among 626 entries from 45 countries and judged by Niamh Coghlan (Director, Richard Saltoun Gallery), Pauline Desouza (Director, Diversity Art Forum), Elvira Dyangani Tse (Director, The Showroom), Eva Langret (Artistic Director, Frieze London), Claire Mander (Chair of Steering Committee UK Friends, National Museum of Women in the Arts and Director, the CoLAB) and Frances Morris (Director, Tate Modern).
The winner of this year’s edition, announced in May 2020, is Helen Benigson. She will have an upcoming solo show in partnership with The Showroom as part of her award. Helen is followed by Violet Costello, recipient of the Online Award, with an online Solo Exhibition with Richard Saltoun Gallery, and Eileen Reynolds recipient of the International Award with an upcoming residency with Procreate Project and art material sponsored by Colart.
Their works raise questions around the representation and construction of the body, religious identities, sexualities and gender, as well as reproductive technologies.
“Procreate Project is a vitally important space that supports and champions artists who are carers, (m)others or parents. Procreate Project understands the elastic fragility of what it means to make and show artwork, at the same time as having competing caring responsibilities. At this very surreal and anxious time that we are all living through, spaces like this are extremely rare and extra special, so I am very grateful to Procreate Project and the Mother Art Prize for existing and supporting our work.” – Helen Benigson, Mother Art Prize 2020 Winner
The exhibition is co-curated by Paola Lucente, director at Procreate Project and Claire Mander (Chair of Steering Committee UK Friends, National Museum of Women in the Arts and Director, the CoLAB).
It will take place at and will coincide with the inauguration and opening of Cromwell Place, a new unique arts and culture destination for art collectors and visitors.
When:
5 – 30 Oct 2020
Private Opening: 5-9 Oct
Public opening: 10 – 30 OCT
Opening Hours:
Mon to Wed by appointment only
Thursday-Sat 10am to 6pm
Sunday 12-4pm
* Due to government guidelines visitors will need to register prior their visit to the exhibition. Book below.
Where:
Cromwell Place
4 Cromwell Pl,
London SW7 2JE
