Announcing Acme's 2019/20 early career award artists
5 November 2019
We are proud to announce Avril Corroon (Goldsmiths MFA Award) and Amy Steel (Adrian Carruthers Award) as recipients of Acme's 2019/20 early career awards.
Artists on Acme’s early career programme occupy a shared studio space at Warton House for one year to foster and encourage an environment of peer support, collaboration and critical engagement.
Artists receive a bursary of £7,000 to support their practice, and will engage with highly respected artists and curators during their time at Warton House working towards at public presentation at PEER in 2020.
Open to artists who demonstrate an outstanding artistic practice, and who would otherwise lack the means to undertake such an opportunity, the awards give individuals the time and space to focus on developing their practice, enabling them to position themselves within the global cultural environment. Running since 2002, over 50 artists have benefitted from Acme’s early career programme, with 81% presenting solo exhibitions within 5 years.
Acme’s early career programme works in collaboration with Goldsmiths College, University of London and Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and is generously supported by the Jane Hamlyn and the Adrian Carruthers Memorial Fund.
Avril Corroon's video's, performances and sculptures explore situations and sites where precarious conditions in the neo-liberal city have become everyday. She re-presents these examples in a humorous and satirical form. Using the circumstances she finds herself in as an entry point, she seeks to interrogate the wider affects of neo-liberalism faced by many of the millennial generation.
Avril was selected for the 2019/20 Goldsmiths MFA Award by artist and writer David Batchelor, Natasha Hoare (Curator, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art), Lea O’Loughlin (Co-Director, Acme) and Paul Bayley (Head of Residencies & Awards, Acme) from a shortlist of six MFA graduate artists from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Amy Steel’s practice asks what a feminist subjectivity could be and how it could affect established structures of power and patriarchal influence on female behaviour. She uniquely combines painting and performance to question systems of representation and the physicality of perception. Her paintings are mostly populated by women engaged in a private, sexual world where visceral pleasures are enacted.
Amy was selected for the 2019/20 Adrian Carruthers Award by artist and award alumni Marianna Simnett, Kieren Reed (Director, Slade School of Fine Art) and Lea O’Loughlin (Co-Director, Acme) from a shortlist of six MFA graduate artists from Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.