Wilfred Southall Sustainability Awards
We are delighted to be working in partnership with Bath Spa University to award grants to students who have demonstrated exceptional work in one or more of the following three categories:
- Sustainable Communication
A project or process that re-presents a contemporary issue or re-considers engagement with a contentious issue in a national or international context. - Sustainable Fabrication
A project or process that makes innovative or ingenious use of materials, promoting material circulation/the circular economy, or energy conscious solutions (including online) in design, sculptural, or material intervention. - Sustainable Community Engagement
A project or process that uses diverse or unexpected collaboration to promote social cohesion/inclusion or reconciliation.
Criteria
The Award is open to taught postgraduate students in Bath School of Art, Film and Media and Bath School of Design. There is no application process – current students will be nominated by lecturers from the schools and selected by an external panel. Students selected for the award will deliver a presentation to peers and staff in the year following their MA qualification.
Awards of £1,000 per category will be given in two instalments: £800 will be paid to the student following an award ceremony at the MA Degree show in September and the balance of £200, when the student has made a presentation on the development of their project to the School of Art, Film and Media and Bath School of Design.
Award Winners 2023
The winners of the Wilfred Southall Sustainability Awards for 2023 are Bedra Sahbaz, Emily Lewin and Edie Evans.
The awards were judged by Steve Dutton (BSU Emeritus Professor of Fine Art), Dr Julian Greaves (BSU Sustainability Manager) and Hannah Whiting (BSU Business Development Manager).
Please click on the images below to view each candidate’s full presentation.
Bedra Sahbaz
Sustainable Communication
A project or process that re-presents a contemporary issue or re-considers engagement with a contentious issue in a national or international context.
The judging panel came to the following conclusions:
Bedra’s installation was found to be a humble and profound work about inner dialogues, histories, pain, exile and solitude. This is important to state here because what the work did was not only bring the matter of communication itself to the fore, in terms of how to get a message across to the widest number of people in the most effective way, but it also did something more subtly in relation to the matter of communication, in terms of asking how one speaks or doesn’t speak, who might be listening and what might they be hearing.
Bedra’s piece was gently stressing something very important, which is how to communicate about difficult things, about solitude, about silence, about hiding, about quietness and about all out inner worlds and inner/outer conflicts, doubts and fears.
Communication about easy things might be said to be easy, but difficult things are a very different matter. If a discussion is to take place around the mattering of sustainable communication then it needs to take place in the context of these more difficult conversations, feelings and situations.
Bedra’s work took this challenge on, in the context of international contexts of war and exile, and did it through the use of materials found to hand, otherwise to be discarded, and in this way, becoming a performance of sorts, of working with what we have , what is here and now and what we find within us. This award was seen to be an acknowledgment of this process, as a which reworks which is already here, both materially and subjectively, something we felt as a panel, that we could all do better perhaps.
To sum up, we turned to Bedra’s own words about her work, she writes:
“I embarked on a journey of inward and outward exploration, driven by a hunger for self-awareness and a desire to bridge personal experiences with universal truths. In this pursuit, my work emerges as a testament to the shared human experience.”
The panel felt that there can be no clearer indication of a desire to communicate about difficult things than that and that the prize would prove hugely beneficial to Bedra’s next steps in this remarkable body of work.
Emily Lewin
Sustainable Fabrication
A project or process that makes innovative or ingenious use of materials, promoting material circulation/the circular economy, or energy conscious solutions (including online) in design, sculptural, or material intervention.
Emily writes in her statement:
“My practice is deeply process led, created in the space in between maker and material autonomy”
What she doesn’t explicitly make clear is that she, like others in the exhibition such as Lichen and indeed Breda, uses discarded material, stuff which is at hand and under our very noses. Out of this so called ‘waste’ Emily created something quite wondrous. This quasi alchemical process, comes over quite literally as a labour of love. The panel felt that the installation within the gallery was “simply gorgeous, and gorgeously simple”.
My own personal first reaction coming up towards the work was akin to walking into a late Morandi painting.
Emily goes on to say that she “Sensitively and curiously is experimenting with tactility, light and tone to reach the edges of what may be expected.”
The panel felt that these edges of what may be expected was a great way to put it, because who could have expected this abundance of stillness from the clay scraps lying around a ceramics studio. And who could have expected, in the context of the speed of contemporary life and indeed the pressures to ‘achieve’ within the Higher Education system, that such a level of care and attention could still be possible. For all its quietude, the panel were convinced that this was a brave work and that the prize would give confidence to Emily to continue listening to the voice inside her that tells her to hold your nerve, stick to the process and let it take her where it will.
Edie Evans
Sustainable Community Engagement
A project or process that uses diverse or unexpected collaboration to promote social cohesion/inclusion or reconciliation
Edie’s statement in the catalogue stated that:
“By making interactive, immersive work that is open to interpretation: moving installations, textiles and moving image she encourages a thoughtful and emotional audience response.”
There was something ‘inclusive’ about the installation, something non-hierarchical, that it was (almost) literally made up of a series of oddballs, each one having its own history and presence in relation to the ones around them.
The panel felt that potential for immersivity in Edie’s work was the key, both in terms of what was there to see, and also in terms of where the work might be heading. The body of work asked fundamental questions about what might actually constitute a community. The panel observed that the question of what constitutes community , especially in the environmental, post human, non-human context that was central to Edie’s work.
It was unclear how the artefacts within the installation came about but the panel imagined they were made not just by Edie’s hands but by others too, over conversations and shared stories. On a personal note I took that further , and imagined people sitting around the clay ‘floor’ digging and shaping those spheres, under the cover perhaps of the clay stained clothes like some form of yurt, surrounded by non-human critters asking where are the edges of the that community, in ‘people’ for sure, but also perhaps in the critters and other non human animals.
The panel felt that that award would allow Edie to explore this aspect of shared making further.
MA Design and MA Fine Art at Bath Spa University
The MA Design and MA Fine Art programmes at Bath Spa University are dynamic, proactive and responsive. Students are encouraged to look broadly across the fields of Art and Design, whilst delving deeply into their own specialist practices.
Learning in conjunction, students from the two programmes are taught and supported by a wide range of specialist lecturers and by one another. They evolve clear practical, developmental approaches to their medium, with grounded individual research questions and critical rigour. The works they create through this process of thinking through making, are carefully designed to suit their specific professional contexts.
For more information, please visit this dedicated Bath Spa University webpage about the awards.