Overall Winner – Jonathan Ashworth

Here we are then. There’s been much to do, but with no further ado, The Biscuit Factory Foundation is brimful of pride to announce the winner of Young Artists of the Year 2011 as Jonathan Ashworth.

As everyone we spoke to about the exhibition emphasised, there was a great depth, diversity and quality of work in YAY from a real breadth of practices and disciplines. Those eventually selected for the show included, in a simplistic overview, artists working in glass, painting, sculpture, jewellery, textiles, printing, collage, and even pyography. Judging work is always hard, and can sometimes even seem to be churlish and somehow at odds with the ethos and spirit of creative practice. But judging work of such widely disparate media and style was especially challenging. To give an indication of the potential difficulty of the decision making negotiations it is fair and accurate to say that every piece of work in the exhibition was positively commented on by at least one of the judging panel. We each had our favourites, and often we surprised each other with our choices. In this context it is remarkable – and really rather fortunate for us – that there was one artist’s work that we all agreed on.

Jonathan Ashworth’s woodcuts spoke to each of the judges – and, to underline the successful execution of his singular vision, they spoke to us all in a similar way. We were all touched by the tender crepuscular quality of his imagery, and were particularly impressed by the way that his craftsmanship works in perfect harmony with the imagery, displaying a similar deft and deceptively simple touch to consolidate the image-making. The work suggests an artist who is already on the way to finding his voice; one whose interest in the nostalgic and enchanting is heartwarming, but also has significant depths as the fractured narratives are undercut with the a subtle sense of loss and even possible malevolence. It is this precision with the nuances of universal human experiences that the judges all responded to, and which elevates Jonathan’s work.

We also saw an artist whose work has a wide-ranging appeal. It is both accessible and sophisticated, and that is perhaps the most important and elusive trick for an emerging professional artist to have mastery of. It is to Jonathan’s considerable credit that at this still burgeoning stage of his career he is able to command his craft to that degree. We know he is working hard at his practice, and we hope this award will be of encouragement and reward for his dedication to his art. Congratulations Jonathan.

Jonathan will be showing with us at The Biscuit Factory in 2012, and we’re already greatly anticipating it.

In the meantime his work can be seen on his website: http://www.jonathanashworth.com/

Look out for more from Jonathan Ashworth and the Biscuit in the coming months.

Once again we’d like to doff our hat mightily to Winsor and Newton, Blackwell’s, and Culture Magazine for their support and sponsorship of this award.

Peoples Choice Winner – Hester Berry

It’s with great pleasure that we announce Hester Berry as the winner of the Peoples Choice award for Young Artists of the Year 2011.

The competition was intensely fought, and we say that not just because it is customary to do so. The ballot box in The Biscuit Factory was perpetually overflowing with voting forms, and there were times when we couldn’t print them fast enough. Plenty of ink has been coaxed through the sometimes infuriatingly tardy, cantankerous and recalcitrant rollers of the gallery’s printers and photocopies to keep the public in slips. Hester’s prize should perhaps be forfeited and used to subsidise our ink stocks because she generated more ballot box ballast then any other artist. Enough that she ought to by now have directorship of several Far East-based electronics multi-conglomo-corporates.

But, in all seriousness, we were delighted with the public reaction and response to the exhibition, and this was certainly reflected in the number of votes cast. As expected there was real variety of opinions, but in the final reckoning in the wake of the conjecture it was Hester who had accumulated more votes than anyone else – and by a significant enough margin that, thankfully, there was no need for a re-count.

We’re very happy to welcome Hester up here onto the metaphorical stage. Her Painting ‘Shine on Silver Sun’ attracted the attention of several members of Biscuit staff who saw a sneak peak of it when her entry came in, and once on the wall it seems to have had a similar effect on our customers and visitors. We know Hester has a series of rubbish tip images from which this painting is taken, and that beyond that she has a substantial body of somewhat more traditional landscape oils which are showing real promise too, so we’re content that the award is going to a deserved winner.

The Biscuit Factory would like to publicly thank Hester for her involvement in the competition and exhibition and wish her the best of luck for the future. We’ll be following her career with interest.

We’d encourage readers to see more of Hester’s work at her website: http://www.hesterberry.co.uk/

And once again, thank you to Winsor and Newton and Blackwell’s for kindly supplying prizes.

 

The Young Artists of the Year 2011 Exhibition

With a touch of sadness we’ve now taken down what turned out to be a tremendously well-received exhibition. We’ve been very pleased with the amount of interest the show has generated. Visitor numbers have been high, and it’s been heartening that so many new people have come along to gallery to see the Young Artists, as well as being particularly pleasing that many of our established customers have been really engaging with and enjoying the show too. As we enter the festive period, and all that remains of YAY 2011 are some empty boxes and ribbons of burst bubblewrap, we’re extremely satisfied to be able to consider Young Artists of the Year 2011 a resounding triumph. That was our goal when we began work on the project in the Spring, and, as ever, it’s been a joy for us to have seen the competition grow and be realised.

We’d like to thank everyone who has been involved in this project – from the artists whose time was invested so heavily in making work and going to the trouble of entering the competition, right through to the gallery visitors who happened upon the show and browsed a few moments. It’s perhaps a slightly sententious cliche, but offering opportunities to for people both to show and to see new work is the reason we do this and having a positive reaction from so many people – on both sides of the artist/audience divide – is always acutely gratifying confirmation that all the hard work is worth the effort, stress, and worn-out email programs. We’re graciously thankful to be able to do what we do.

A few hearty thank yous  for their involvement: Sebastian Messer for his initial input and direction; Rebecca Morrill of Contemporary Art Society for her amiable insight; Ivor Stolliday for his affable enthusiasm; Dave Whetstone of The Journal for supporting and encouraging this project; Sam Knowles for his time and space resources; Archigrad for their support; Anne Allen and Eva Zandman at NeSt for kindly offering exhibition opportunity and support; and of course our headline sponsors Winsor and Newton and Blackwell’s for their generous donations and keen interest.

Here are a few photos of the show, for those of you that couldn’t make it – and for those of you who did, but would like to be reminded of it.

 

Last Day

Today is the last day of the Young Artists of the Year 2011 show. We’ll be fully doffing our cap to everyone involved at a later point, but for now we’d like to offer our sincere thanks to everyone involved in making this such as success, and encourage anyone in the Biscuit vicinity to get over and have a look before we take it down tomorrow.

Once it’s down we’ll be using a handy snow shovel to dig through the piles of voting slips for the Peoples Choice award. Once we’ve done the maths we’ll be announcing the winner here, along with the Judges’ winner too. So, the exhibition may be over, but there’s plenty more still to come…

Exhibition Time

So, long time to update. To cut a long story necessarily short because of crazy time contstraints: we received a huge amount of entries; we whittled them down to a manageable number to exhibit in a coherent show; those artists delivered us their work; we installed it; some judging happened; and now we’re on the cusp of the official opening of the show.

None of that does any justice to any aspect of that process, but those oversights will have to wait for the coming week to be remedied. Right now we’re so busy that this will have to suffice.

The show is looking good, and although it’s not complete – as can be seen from the above picture taken during install – it’s getting there. A few more sentences on here and I’ll print out the price labels and get the work ready for sale. It’s the opening evening of the exhibition tonight, along with the rest of The Biscuit Factory winter show, 6pm-9pm at The Biscuit Factory, Newcastle. Anyone who can make it is more than welcome. We had originally intended to announce the winner at this opening evening, but because of various changes in plan – the exhibition now being at The Biscuit Factory, the shown opening earlier to accommodate that move, the judging being the day before, and a majority of exhibitors not being able to attend – we won’t now being doing that, and will instead announce it after the exhibition, along with the People’s Choice winner. This means everyone can enjoy the exhibition at ‘face value’ and all exhibitors will get due recognition.

We hope some of you can make it down to The Biscuit Factory tonight. As ever it’s been a tremendously busy lead up to the new show opening. This one has been particularly busy, with lots going on, and we’ve been a key member of the Biscuit team down at the sharp end of the install. So best wishes to Sean – hopefully he’s feeling a little better and will make a full and speedy return to action.

 

Live from The Curator’s Office 5pm November 7th…

It’s gone 5pm on 7th November – the time we had advised would be the latest entrants would hear from us if they’d been chosen for the exhibition.  Fortunately, the good news is that if you haven’t heard from us yet it doesn’t mean you haven’t been selected. We’ve had more entries than we had expected – especially over the weekend – and it’s taking us a little longer than we hoped to get through them all and make selections. In the meantime the bad news is that you’ll have to wait a tiny bit longer before finding out whether you’re a chosen one, but please bear with us, and we hope we’ll be in touch with you with some good news soon.

Like Cinderella at the fireworks

A quick update live from a freezing field full of fizzing fireworks: just to confirm, we’ll be accepting online entries until midnight tonight. The 5pm deadline was for in-person submissions delivered to The Biscuit Factory. Thank you for all those. We’ll be processing them tomorrow and then we’ll be in touch with successful entrants, so stand by for that. In the meantime we’re at the fireworks – hoping that we’ll be treated to a final explosion of incandescent beauty in the starry clear sky of our inbox come the morning.

Nothing but Good News – but IMPORTANT News

With just over a week to go until the closing date for submissions we’ve had a development. A very positive development. Because we’re in the happy position of having the largest commercial art gallery outside of London at our disposal, we’ve decided to take an opportunity which has presented itself and move the Young Artists of the Year exhibition from our sister space The Holy Biscuit to The Biscuit Factory itself. This, of course, is brilliant news, and through this we can look forward to the show having even more exposure and reaching an even wider audience.

The exhibition will now open a few days earlier than was planned and will be part of The Biscuit Factory’s Winter show. The preview for this will be 18th November, with the YAY exhibition running until 4th December. As you can see from those dates that makes the exhibition a little longer than it was, and this move also means that while it will no longer have it’s own opening night, it will now be part of a preview that generally attracts over 1000 people – so this is nothing but good news for entrants.

We’re aware that moving it at this relatively late stage has the potential to inconvenience people. But we hope that this won’t be the case because it’s before the closing date for entries and before any entrant has had their participation confirmed. We felt that the opportunity to hold the exhibition in The Biscuit Factory was one we couldn’t pass up, and that the benefits of this move for everybody vastly outweigh any potential disruption. We hope you feel the same, and that you aren’t adversely affected by this.

This move in opening date hasn’t altered the other dates in the schedule – but it has made them a little less flexible. The date for delivery of selected work to The Biscuit Factory is still 7th – 13th November, but now it’s even more imperative that artist’s get their work to us on time because we have less margin for delays – so much less, in fact, that it’d be more accurate to say that we now don’t have a margin for delay! We’ll be feeling the pinch ourselves too, so there’ll be no delay from us and if you’re selected for the exhibition you will hear from us by 5pm of the 7th November at the latest.

There are links to The Biscuit Factory website all over this website, but there’s another for those of you unfamiliar with us. We look forward to seeing your work here. Good luck, and remember – as if you weren’t aware! – you only have 215 hours and 34 minutes left to enter.

Image of The Biscuit Factory by Jim Edwards

Obviously 5 Believers

A quick pre-weekend heads up on the judges for Young Artists of the Year for those of you regular readers who may’ve not checked back on the Judges page since you first found us. At the start of October we were pleased to confirm that we’d secured our judging panel. Without any more to do, they are:

Sam Knowles | Curator at The Biscuit Factory

Rebecca Morrill | Head of North East Collecting at The Contemporary Art Society

Ivor Stolliday | Trustee at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art

Sam Waters | Curator and Project Manager of Young Artists of the Year

Dave Whetstone | Art Editor at The Journal and Editor of Culture Magazine

The panel will convene in November to ruminate on choosing a winner and try not to bicker about it.

A Month and a Day to untie your Digits

We’re now into the second half of the entry window for YAY, and in a month and a day we’ll be closing the competition to entries. If you don’t have enough fingers to count those days off on – and you really shouldn’t – that’s November the 6th. Or, to put it in a less abstract Gregorian way that may make you realise just how soon that is and get your entry sent over to us real sharpish: 4 weeks on Sunday. 32 days, if you’re a frustrated pentadactyl precisionist.

Now that you know all that you can stop tying your digits in knots and pick up a paintbrush – or anything you can use to make art to send us. The entries we’ve had so far are great, so thank you to all those artists who’ve already submitted. We’re looking forward to putting together a show which is really interesting and diverse. So those of you still finding our website – yes, we can see you on the analytics – please join in. We’re hoping this can become a really high quality show. Click Entry Form at the top of this page for the details on how to get involved.