The nominees work using sculpture, photography, paintings and found objects to express their art.
ADVERTISEMENTThis year's shortlist of names has been announced for the Turner Prize, Britain's most prestigious visual arts award which will be awarded at the Tate gallery in Liverpool.
The four nominees are:
Heather Phillipson, who works with different materials and across media, in what she calls "quantum thought experiments." Her commission for the fourth plinth in London's Trafalgar Square called THE END, features a giant ice cream with a cherry on top, and a fly and drone perched on the side. It has been "scaled up for its ultimate size and context – one in which the surrounding architecture and its population are participants in a mis-scaled landscape, magnifying the banal, and our cohabitation with other lifeforms, to apocalyptic proportions" she said.
Ingrid Pollard, who was born in Guyana, has been nominated for her solo exhibition Carbon Slowly Turning at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. Pollard works primarily in photography, but also sculpture, film and sound, and her work questions our relationship with the natural world and interrogates ideas such as Britishness, race and sexuality.
Veronica Ryan has been nominated for her solo exhibition Along a Spectrum, at Spike Island in Bristol, and her Hackney Windrush Art Commission in London. Ryan creates sculptural objects and installations using containers, compartments, and combinations of natural and fabricated forms to reference displacement, fragmentation and alienation. Along a Spectrum "examines environmental and socio-political concerns, personal narratives, history and displacement, as well as the wider psychological implications" of the COVID pandemic, the gallery notes.
Sin Wai Kin is nominated for their involvement in the British Art Show 9, and their solo presentation at Blindspot Gallery, Frieze London. Sin brings fantasy to life through storytelling in performance, moving image, writing, and print. Drawing on their own experience existing between binary categories, their work realises fictional narratives to describe lived realities of desire, identification, and consciousness.
What is the Turner Prize?
First established in 1984, the Turner Prize is seen as the most important award in the UK honouring visual artists. Winners receive £25,000, while £5 goes to each of the other shortlisted artists.
The prize is awarded to a British artist, and that can mean an artist primarily working in Britain, or an artist born in Britain but working globally. The prize focuses on their recent work, rather than being a lifetime achievement award.
Every other year, a venue outside Tate Britain, London hosts the prize. Previous host galleries have been in Newcastle, Hull, Derry/Londonderry, Margate and Coventry.
Some former winners include household names from the world of art including Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Damien Hirst.
