Max Mara Art Prize
THE SECOND EDITION
The second edition (2007-2009) of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in collaboration with the Whitechapel was presented on June, 8th 2007 at the British Pavilion, during the 52nd Venice Art Biennale. The judging panel of the prize, chaired by Iwona Blazwick -Whitechapel Gallery, Director - included Rachel Withers, Art Critic; Cornelia Grassi, Gallerist; Cornelia Parker, Artist and Collector Judith Greer. On October 2007 five artists have been short-listed by the judging panel: Yasmeen Al Awadi, Georgie Hopton, Melanie Jackson, Lisa Peachey and Hannah Rickards.
On the basis of the projects that the short-listed artists have presented to the judging panel, on January, 29th 2008, during a gala dinner at Italian Embassy in London, Hannah Rickards has been announced as the winner of the Prize.
The artist was awarded a six-month residency in Italy, which was spent at the American Academy in Rome and the Pistoletto Foundation in Biella. This, together with funding received through the Prize and supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, has afforded Rickards the time to research and develop her new work for more than a year.
The resultant work will be showcased at the recently expanded Whitechapel Gallery and then at the Maramotti Collection in Reggio Emilia (Italy), which will acquire it permanently.
THE WINNER
Hannah Rickards (1979, Hammersmith, London) lives and works in London.
She completed a BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2002.
Rickards was selected to exhibit at Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2003) and Don Quijote at Witte De With Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam (2006). She has also exhibited in recent group shows in Oslo, Cologne and Berlin and in 2008 was included in the group show Nought to Sixty at the Institute of Contemporary Art.
Rickards - the youngest among the short-listed artists - is a conceptual artist, often involving sound as a favoured media. Nature and artifice are densely connected in her work. Her sound installations often involve translating a sound occurring in nature, and then interpreting it back in to language or music.
In Birdsong (2002) Rickards recorded songs from six different birds, before lowering the pitch and replicating them with her own voice. In Thunder (2005) she stretched an eight second recording of a thunderclap to 7 minutes, this sound was then transcribed in to a score by composer David Murphy. The score was recorded and reduced back to the length of the original thunderclap. Another installation, exhibited at The Showroom in 2007, was structured around the spoken accounts of people who had reported perceiving the sound of the Aurora Borealis.
THE AWARDED ARTWORK
Rickards’ two-screen film - No, there was no red. - will be based on spoken accounts of a displaced image of a city seen over Lake Michigan as the result of rare temperature inversion mirages. The subjective divergences, consistencies, echoes and counterpoints of these accounts, will form the core of the piece, offering an exploration about how this natural phenomenon is experienced and translated.
An integral part of Rickards’ work is the presence of text, reflecting the influence of early Conceptual artists such as Douglas Huebler, Robert Barry and Lawrence Weiner.
PRESENTATION OF THE ARTWORK
5 - 23 September 2009, Whitechapel Gallery, London E1
24 October 2009, private preview at the Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy
Opens to the public:
25-31 October 2009 at the Pattern Room
From 12 November 2009 in semi-permanent exhibition at the temporary shows room
Download the press release in PDF format
Link Whitechapel Gallery
still from No, there was no red. Courtesy the Artist. 2009
Hannah Rickards
Text from Birdsong
2002
Cover of the Vinyl catalogue of Thunder
2005-2006
Installation view, The Showroom, 2007
©Daniel Brooke
Annotated Transcripts 2009, Courtesy the Artist
still from No, there was no red. Courtesy the Artist. 2009