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
