Ed Burkes has been awarded the Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award
Foundation Derbyshire and Mall Galleries are pleased to announce Ed Burkes as the winner of the eighth Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award. The biennial award brings a rising artist to Derbyshire to produce work inspired by the county’s landscape, heritage and people.
As one of the largest art awards in the country, the Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award provides the successful artist with a nine-month residency, a bursary of £18,000, a studio, contribution to the cost of materials, ongoing support and mentoring from the University of Derby’s College of Arts, and two solo shows in Derby and London.
Artist Ed Burkes will take up his residency in Derby in October 2019, when he will be based in Banks Mill Studios, working towards a solo exhibition at Derby Museum and Art Gallery in 2020, which travels to Mall Galleries in 2021.
Since graduating from Falmouth University in 2016 with a BA in Fine Art, Ed’s work has been selected for a number of group exhibitions, including Saatchi Invest in Art and FBA Futures 2017, shortlisted for Bloomberg New Contemporaries and exhibited at London Art Fair with Arusha Gallery. In 2016, he won the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Travel to Italy Award.
Ed Burkes on the Isles of Scilly (2018)
Ed has said that his work “is sparked from a commonplace situation: A friend drinking coffee, a buddy pulling up his socks, someone browsing the fruit and veg section of Tesco Express. Through the process of painting, these preliminary considerations begin to wobble out of sync to a point where their distinctiveness as a primary source slip away.” The bright colours and bold compositions give the everyday scenes a mythic and heroic air.
During his residency, Ed will contribute five days of teaching at the University of Derby’s College of Arts and lead a series of educational workshops in the community, supported by funding from Rolls-Royce plc. The collaboration with the University of Derby’s College of Arts will enable art students to gain valuable insight from the experience and practices of a working artist.
Ed said, “I am so grateful for the opportunity to be able to spend nine months delving into the historical intrigues that Derbyshire has to offer. Engaging with the wider community of the contemporary art world with a teaching fellowship at Derby University is something I am incredibly excited by and can’t wait to get started. I am going to produce a large, ambitious, and historically grounded body of work from the premise ‘sense of place’ and will be looking to concretise and foster long term connections and relations.”
Ed Burkes Old Boy (Red and Blue)
Rachael Grime, Chief Executive of Foundation Derbyshire said: “We are delighted that Ed is joining us at this really exciting stage in the Award’s development. We can’t wait to see how he responds to our county and brings his exceptional talent to bear on the residency”.
In 2019, in a new collaboration between the Award and Mall Galleries, past exhibitors of FBA Futures, the UK’s largest annual survey of emerging figurative art, were invited to be considered for this exciting residency.
The nine-month residency runs from 1 October 2019 to 30 June 2020. The final exhibition will be held at Derby Museum and Art Gallery in late 2020 and at Mall Galleries in January 2021. Watch this space for updates as Ed’s residency unfolds.
