"Loading..."

News & Events

Recipients of the 2018 Stuart Croft Foundation Awards announced

Stuart Croft Foundation is delighted to announce that the recipients of the 2018 funding awards are Lucy Pawlak (Moving Image Award, £5000), Adam Roberts (Research Award, £3000) and Jennifer Martin (Education Award, £2000).

Launched in 2017, the Stuart Croft Foundation Awards enable filmmakers, curators, writers, researchers, students and recent graduates working between and beyond the gallery and cinema to create small-scale projects, where other funding may be difficult to obtain.

The Moving Image Award supports moving image artists and filmmakers to test new ideas and take risks with both form and content. The Education Award supports post-graduate students (MA and Doctoral research candidates) and those within their first two years of graduating to conduct specific aspects of their film practice. The new Research Award supports projects that respond to the rich material and themes within the Stuart Croft archive held at BFI National Archive.

Artist Lucy Pawlak’s Holding uses a boxing fight narrative to navigate strange loops of failure/success and undo the inadequate binary of abled/disabled. Conveying the body through intimate cinematography and sound design, Holding will explore time pushed out of joint, a space of transition between supporting, holding, flailing, punching, and slipping.

“Receiving support from Stuart Croft Foundation offers me the chance to deepen the relationship my filmmaking practice has to narrative cinema, creating the conditions for spending time working with performers, crew and in post-production. I am excited and grateful for the opportunity this unique award provides to make such collaborations.”

– Lucy Pawlak, 2018 Moving Image Award recipient.

Curator, filmmaker and writer Adam Robert’s research project Retrospect: residue, trace, absence calibrates two artists – Chantal Akerman and Stuart Croft – against each other, in a scrutiny of how traces and residues can impact on the experience of their absences.

Artist and recent graduate Jennifer Martin’s installation, Teeth, centres on the displacement of the black/brown voice traversing racism and misogyny in institutions, and the ‘teeth’ in UK immigration policy described by former Home Secretary Amber Rudd.

The awards were selected from over two hundred and fifty applications by Stuart Croft Foundation’s trustees; artists Steven Eastwood, Keira Greene and Anna Lucas, and Whitstable Biennale Director Sue Jones.

The Foundation was struck by the inventiveness, rigour and reach of the selected proposals, and the calibre of the recipients’ previous work. We’re very much looking forward to supporting these projects as they develop over the coming year.


LUCY PAWLAK – HOLDING
MOVING IMAGE AWARD (£5000)
Image: photo taken at Sully’s Boxing Gym, Toronto by Lucy Pawlak, 2018

Artist Lucy Pawlak’s moving image project, Holding, uses a boxing fight narrative to navigate strange loops of failure/success and undo the inadequate binary of abled/disabled. Structured within four three-minute rounds of both choreographed and improvised sequences, Holding will set rules and bodies off-balance, unsettling identities of referee, fighter, judge and corner person to fall into a strange time pushed out of joint. Conveying the body through intimate cinematography and sound design, Holding plunges into the slipperiness of desire and embodiment, circling spirals of self-reflexivity, and weaving languages of assertion, uncertainty, competition, power and weakness; to work towards re-thinking our understanding of handicaps and advantages in relation to privilege.

Lucy Pawlak‘s body of work aims to make room for improvisation and play within structure. The various mediums Pawlak uses (time based media, performance, writing, drawing, chat) act as frameworks for considering how and why we adhere to systems and what possibilities breaking with patterns might offer. Performances, screenings and workshops include: Jumex Museum (Mexico City), Whitstable Biennial (UK), Videonale (Bonn, Germany) The Showroom, Hollybush Gardens, ICA and BFI (London). Screen writing collaborations: Maquinaria Panamericana with Joaquin del Paso. Premier: Berlin Film Festival, awarded Best Script at the Mexican Ariel Academy Awards 2017 and at Raindance Film Festival, London.


ADAM ROBERTS – RETROSPECT: RESIDUE, TRACE, ABSENCE
RESEARCH AWARD (£3000)
Image: Footsteps in sand, Wells, Norfolk, Adam Roberts, 2005

Curator, filmmaker and writer Adam Roberts’ research project Retrospect: residue, trace, absence questions what happens when an artist dies, and the ensuing search for holding and reanimating the absent longed-for artist. Roberts worked with Chantal Akerman on a retrospective of her work, and her suicide was a shock to him. A few months before Akerman, Stuart Croft also died. Retrospect: residue, trace, absence is motivated by the possibility of calibrating one artist against the other in a scrutiny of how traces and residues can impact on the experience of their absences.

Adam Roberts is a curator, filmmaker and writer about film. As a curator he founded A Nos Amours with Joanna Hogg to explore the marginal area between the cinema auditorium and the artist film. A Nos Amours has shown artists’ films on big multiplex screens and cinema films in small gallery spaces, organising retrospectives and one offs, and curating Chantal Akerman NOW – a large scale exhibition of moving image installation art at Ambika P3. Adam writes in order to understand and promote the work he curates. As a filmmaker he has collaborated with dance makers and composers, notably with Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion and Sylvie Guillem.


JENNIFER MARTIN – TEETH
EDUCATION AWARD (£2000)
Image: Meanwhile on Set…, Jennifer Martin, 2018

Artist Jennifer Martin’s project, Teeth, will be a single screen moving image work situated within a sculptural installation. It centres on two experiences of an oral nature— delegating one’s own black/brown voice to be rearticulated by white individuals as a stratagem of traversing racism and misogyny in institutions, and the ‘teeth’ in the UK immigration policy as described by former Home Secretary Amber Rudd, which linguistically encapsulates an immigrant experience of being continually devoured by systems that seek to churn them up and spit them out, somewhere, elsewhere.

Jennifer Martin is based in London, working with photography, moving image, and installation. Her work operates in part as interventions and articulations of largely social-racial dynamics and lived experiences; an underlying provocation of a call to relook is threaded throughout Martin’s practice. A driving question of Martin’s recent work involves the role of art and media, more broadly, in the social and psychological construction of race and its intersection with representation, agency, nostalgia, and identification.


Read more about the Stuart Croft Foundation Awards on our Awards page.

Share:
Contact: info@stuartcroftfoundation.org © Stuart Croft Foundation 2017 | Registered charity No. 1163676 | Website: tmck.co.uk