Liverpool Art Prize

The People's Choice Award for the 2009 Liverpool Art Prize has been increased from £500 to £1000.

We are very grateful indeed to the sponsors of this award, Arthur Diamond Design who, not only provide this cash prize, but also donate their time and services to print the flyers, invitations, exhibition signs and banners.

Indeed we are blessed with a wonderful team of sponsors, with Duncan Sheard Glass donating the main £2000 prize, Alexander MacGregor designing and producing the catalogue and other printed material and Novas providing such a great exhibition space.

The short list for the 2009 Liverpool Art Prize is as follows:

AL and AL

Terry Duffy

McCoy Wynne

Nicki McCubbing

Richard Meaghan

Elizabeth Willow

More details about the artists here

Many thanks to all the nominees and nominators for giving the panel of judges such a hard task in choosing this list from over 80 nominations.
The exhibition is scheduled to take place in the Novas CUC gallery from March 13 to May 4 2009.

Elizabeth Willow lives and works in Liverpool, and has studied dance, psychology and fine art.

She has exhibited locally and nationally, including Jump Ship Rat, the Bluecoat, the Royal Court Theatre, Rossendale Museum and Glastonbury festival.

Elizabeth’s practice combines elements of sculpture, installation, intervention, poetry and performance, and draws on diverse methods and techniques including flower-arranging, taxidermy, embroidery, dance and bookbinding.

Richard Meaghan’s paintings are an amalgamation of a number of differing experiences that revolve around memory, making use of allegorical and pictorial inventions and references from contemporary art and art history.

Meaghan’s narrations are not linear, but rather associative and analytical, so that the works function like short stories, in which the plot is compressed into a single image. However, the fragments have to be pieced together and thus can seemingly fall somewhere between dream and reality. The resulting paintings appear as visions of somewhere familiar yet strange, uncanny shimmerings based on careful study of our world that in turn suggests another.

"My work focuses on the everyday, the cheap, the crude, the funny, the throwaway. I use objects in sculpture and installation that I find in cheap shops, second hand shops, pound shops and joke shops that are innately representative of the society they come from. I am interested in appropriation and creating fiction out of reality.
    
Often the process of shopping plays a role in my work, and the constant pursuit of cheap materials, takes me to many interesting places, as well as some scary ones. It is interesting that most cheap shops selling bright, cheerful plastic goods, are situated in poor, often troubled areas, where there is sometimes little to be happy about. This is reflected in the work. It is happy and funny, but with a dark side. Humour is often used to mask darker currents, especially in the culture I have been brought up in, in Liverpool.

Steve McCoy and Stephanie Wynne are based in Merseyside with a commercial photographic partnership and a fine art practice relating to landscape and the environment.

During the Liverpool Biennial this year they launched their book and photographic exhibition of quiescent places awaiting their planned regeneration.

Over the past 5 years they have responded to buildings and environments that are about to undergo a change of use.

Terry Duffy was born in Liverpool and at the early age of 13 won a scholarship for Art School in Liverpool. Following this he trained as a lithographer / photographer and then for several years worked in several print and design studios in London.

From 1972 he studied at Liverpool Art College, where he met and worked with such eminent visiting artists as Joseph Beuys, John Cage & Merce Cunningham. In '75 and '76 he was selected for the New Contemporaries exhibition in London. His work experimented with line, form and space as it does today yet also with the then radical issues concerning Live Art and questioning perceptions of the gallery space.

AL and AL met in a chance encounter whilst visiting Derek Jarman’s Garden in 1997. Having subsequently graduated together in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins School of Art in 2001, they built a blue screen performance studio in London. From this blue space, AL and AL have programmed and produced a body of digital video work which uses computer generated environments to provide simulated contexts for their studio performances. They have exhibited internationally in galleries, site-specific installations, film festivals and television.

The final list of over 80 nominations for the 2009 Liverpool Art Prize. In alphabetical order of surname with website if available. The judges are judging - short list to be announced later this month...

The winner of the Liverpool Art Prize 2008, Imogen Stidworthy, is one of only 4 artists to be shortlisted for the Northern Art Prize.
Here's a report from the Liverpool Daily Post..