From 30 May 2015 artists Lucy Clout and Marianna Simnett, winners of the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2015, will showcase new moving-image works in an exhibition at CCA, Glasgow. These new works, suggested by the project title ‘What Will They See of Me?’, have been developed following the award of £20,000 commissions to each artist at the close of the first stage of the awards in April 2014.
Over the last year Lucy and Marianna have expanded the initial pilot ideas they presented in stage one of the awards into even more accomplished moving-image works. Together, these projects further explore the uncertainties and ambiguities of identity in response to the curatorial brief, ‘What Will They See of Me?’. Both artists consider how images of the self are rehearsed and relayed for others, and how the faces people project to the world are complex and many-sided. In their different ways, they both ask what shapes and constitutes a ‘subject’. Identity, like destiny, may be largely in the blood, but it is also, and increasingly, in our own hands.
Lucy Clout’s ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ will examine what makes or breaks a story journalistically. Featuring interviews with news journalists, bloggers and feature writers on the subject of what makes a useful interview or an interesting encounter, Clout’s video hones in on the interview process itself, and the amount of preparation and self-assertion each interviewer regards as necessary to their job. These descriptions begin to expose the basic power dynamics played out in other spoken relationships, conversations and encounters.
Continuing the fascination with the rites of passage of early adolescence that distinguished her previous film ‘The Udder’, Marianna Simnett shifts her compass from rural England to the majestic mountain landscapes of Albania. Here her young heroine Isabel is shadowed (or watched over dutifully) by Lali, a middle-aged ‘sworn virgin’ whose refusal to be identified as female casts doubt over Isabel’s perceptions and bodily intimations of womanhood. Stark and haunting, Simnett’s film, called simply ‘Blood’, has the strange, unsettling familiarity of a fairy tale.
The Jerwood/FVU Awards are a collaboration between Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Film and Video Umbrella (FVU) in association with Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow and University of East London, School of Arts and Digital Industries. FVU is supported by Arts Council England.