The Arts Foundation Futures Awards 2022 Programme

...continuing into the future, dreaming all the time.

2022

Olivia Laing, Everybody

Savinder Bual Elissa Brunato Riccardo Cenedella Rhea Dillon Lee Hart Anna Himali Howard Sophie Koko Gate Guan Lee Helen Monks & Matt Woodhead (LUNG) Sadé Mica Patrick Morris Conrad Murray Shenece Oretha Eliza Shaddad Libita Sibungu Max Barton & Jethro Cooke (Slowstepper) Love Ssega Mary Stark Petra Szemán Hanna Tuulikki

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bout The Arts Foundation is a charity that supports individual artists and creatives in the UK with unconditional financial support. Since 1993, the Foundation has given nearly £2 million to creatives across the spectrum of the Arts.

We champion the contemporary arts, and believe that creative practice is integral to the wellbeing of society. Our annual fellowship scheme, the Arts Foundation Futures Awards (AFFA), awards artists with no strings attached funds based on a body of past work, to critically, enable their future development. We feel the contribution of our fellowship scheme, the Arts Foundation Futures Awards to the Arts in the UK is demonstrated by its past Fellows, many of whom have become leaders in their respective art forms.

The awards give out five £10,000 fellowships, with all finalists each receiving £1,000. Each year the awards focus on both broad and innovative art forms, across Craft, Design, Film, Literature, Material Innovation, Music, New Media, Performing and Visual Arts, aiming to highlight lesser-known areas of creative practice and multidisciplinary artists.

Given ongoing precarity across the arts and culture sector, we are really pleased to provide financial support to artists and creative practitioners at a pivotal moment in their practice.

We are greatly encouraged by the ingenuity, generosity, and often challenging, and interdisciplinary focused practices of all the AFFA 2022 finalists. We have no doubt their respective work will have a significant impact, and it is such a privilege to be able to support their future development and career trajectories.

On behalf of the Board of Trustees, we would like to thank everyone involved in this years’ awards: to all the artists, you have truly inspired; our wonderful category Judges and Nominators for their insights, care and attention to nurturing artistic practice; and Friends of the Foundation and our award Supporters for your partnership and belief in the importance of artists and creativity - The David Collins Foundation, The Maria Björnson Memorial Fund, the PRS Foundation and The Yoma Sasburg Estate.

We look forward to welcoming you to our virtual Award Ceremony!

26 January 2022 7.00 - 7.30 pm GMT Online artsfoundation.co.uk Sign up to our mailing list to receive all our AFFA updates

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Petra Szemán Monomyth gekijouban (2021) Digital still image

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Judges Animation Supported by The David Collins Foundation

Birgitta Hosea, Johnny Kelly, Edwin Rostron Materials Innovation Lily Cole, Edwin Heathcote, Mark Miodownik Music For Change Supported by PRS Foundation

Edith Bowman, Sam Lee, Gavin Starks Theatre-Makers Supported by The Maria Björnson Memorial Fund

Saad Eddine Said, Liz Moreton, Kate Pakenham Visual Arts Supported by The Yoma Sasburg Estate

Oreet Ashery, Anne Barlow, Cherie Federico

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Riccardo Cenedella Alimenta (2020) Flower pot made from food waste. bottom

Hanna Tuulikki Sourcemouth: LiquidBody (2016) Film still

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inalists Animation

Materials Innovation

Supported by The David Collins Foundation

Savinder Bual 8

Elissa Brunato 16

Sophie Koko Gate 10

Riccardo Cenedella 18

Mary Stark 12

Guan Lee 20

Petra Szemán 14

Patrick Morris 22

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LUNG Theatre Drama Teacher Conference (2019) Credit Emma Hare

Guan Lee Project Etna (2022) Ceramic Chair, Clay, Recycled dust by M-A-L (Material Architecture Lab) Student Researcher: Sam Twaite

Shenece Oretha Dearly Beloved (2019)

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Theatre-Makers Supported by The Maria Björnson Memorial Fund

Lee Hart 32 Music For Change

Anna Himali Howard 34

Supported by PRS Foundation

Helen Monks and Matt Woodhead (LUNG) 36

Max Barton and Jethro Cooke (Slowstepper) 24

Conrad Murray 38

Eliza Shaddad 26 Love Ssega 28

Visual Arts Supported by The Yoma Sasburg Estate

Hanna Tuulikki 30

Rhea Dillon 40 Sadé Mica 42 Shenece Oretha 44 Libita Sibungu 46

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Finalists

Savinder Bual Animation Supported by The David Collins Foundation

Savinder Bual is fascinated by the mechanics and illusory qualities of cinema and early animation; “We live in a time where physical things are disappearing.

This has drawn me to juxtapose tangible everyday materials with the relative immateriality of video.” Holding an MA in Photography from the RCA, when making her work, Savinder imagines herself to be a cinema pioneer from the 18th and 19th centuries. This period of engineering advancements and mechanical inventions was inextricably linked to new ways of seeing as a form of colonial control, from navigating the seas to the 24 hour clock replacing the sun as a marker of time.

Savinder explores the interplay between the moving and the still, creating work that sits between the pre-cinematic and the digital.

Fade (2020) takes the first self-recording tidal gauge as its starting point – an observation device erected on the Isle of Sheppey in 1830. A water-powered slide projector projects an image of a seascape, which slowly appears to flood. In Javasu (2019) a sea monster weaves and bends through wooden rollers, drawing upon various points in history in which the pineapple and moving panoramas triggered the public’s imagination to wonder what it was like to journey to faraway lands.

Punch (2019) and Walk Cycle (2018) see Disney-esque illustrations of fists and shoes animated through automatons, while Pinjekan (2015) animates illustrated wings with air-powered devices made with wood, cotton, steel and Japanese Shoji.

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PUNCH (2019) Video still bottom

Javasu (2019) Exhibition at Caraboo Projects

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Finalists

Sophie Koko Gate Animation Supported by The David Collins Foundation

London based Sophie Koko Gate works in the “untouched territory” that lies between experimental and mainstream animation. She sees her practice as a parallel existence that runs alongside ours, creating strangely familiar characters that live on behind the scenes, ageing and changing design with the films telling stories, evoking a feeling or simply to escape. Her film Half Wet (2015) explores ideas around ageing – specifically the loss of water or evaporation of one’s self as we near death. Sophie adds, “I wish animation could give off scent. Half Wet would be the smell of a hot country crossed with your ex-lovers deodorant”.

A later film, Slug Life (2018) centers around Tanya, a curious woman who after exhausting all options on the post-apocalyptic land she inhabits, has developed a taste for non-human lovers. Her bedroom experiments result in the creation of a beautiful giant slug but can such a perfect creature survive in this gnarly world full of freaks and beefs?

In 2020 Sophie collaborated with Adult Swim to create a Rick and Morty Bumper short, Brunch, which sees the iconic duo unravel into insanity while “off duty” in a rehab-like resort, waiting for their fourth season to be released; “a relaxed mind is a dangerous thing for the unhinged, forever haunted by the memories of the last three seasons”.

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Slug Life (2018) Video stills

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Finalists

Mary Stark Animation Supported by The David Collins Foundation

Mary Stark’s journey to complete her PhD in 2020 began while studying Embroidery at Manchester Metropolitan University. A fourth generation Mancunian needlewoman, she experimented with sound and video, and began to consider editing as a way to ‘stitch’ different elements together to create new meanings. Her films today respond to the history of terminologies, techniques and apparatus from textile practice adopted by filmmaking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the forgotten women who worked in the cutting rooms of early cinema.

For Delia (2016) responds to the archive of Delia Derbyshire, the pioneering figure in British electronic music behind the theme tune of Doctor Who. The 1400 foot 35mm film print translates her hand-drawn graphic scores into sprocket holes, splicing tape, finger prints, dust specks, scribbles, scrawls, typewritten text, scraps of fabric, lace and thread, alluding to an absent female body.

Working in a new area of experimental film and animation that builds on ‘Reel Time’ by British artist Annabel Nicholson, Mary created Film as Fabric (20132017); an expanded cinema performance responding to feminist discussion. The work developed through numerous iterations which were devised, and often performed, in former cotton mills in Manchester showing analogue film as fabric and stitching as editing informed by the process of making a dress. Her visible presence editing, stitching and projecting film interrogates the hidden labour of women in early film.

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Performance at Radio Revolten, Halle, Germay (2016) bottom

Double Dapple (2016) Video still

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Finalists

Petra Szemán Animation Supported by The David Collins Foundation

Gateshead-based animator Petra Szemán is heavily influenced by the early filmography of Japanese director Makoto Shinkai, and grew up watching the works of post-communist Hungarian experimental animators such as Marcell Jankovics.

In 2018-2020 they were awarded a MEXT Research Scholarship to fund two years of research and development in Tsukuba, Japan, where they began reworking the ‘hero’s journey’ structure with the principles of the gaiden, a nonlinear narrative used in manga and anime that translates to mean ‘(out)side story’.

Petra’s work follows the journeys of Yourself, an avatar protagonist on a pilgrimage through landscapes that have become oversaturated with fiction. A deeply personal avatar, Yourself is used to interrogate the potential of animation to challenge binary fictions such as East-vs-West, real vs not real, academia vs pop culture, here vs there.

A body tied to animation posits a realm of possibilities, and Petra asks ‘rather than inquiring into its relationship to the real, it may be better to ask: what new territories may be opened up?’ Moving between the intersection of artists’ moving image, animation, and video games, they layer real life footage with 2D frame-by-frame animation and game landscapes, searching for holes in world-building and contexts where the narrative falters.

Petra is one of five artists commissioned to create new work for On Animatics, a project culminating in a series of online exhibitions and the publication of a book coauthored with Jamie Sutcliffe.

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Monomyth: gaiden / Master of Two Worlds (2020) Video still

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Finalists

Elissa Brunato Materials Innovation

Elissa Brunato began her career in embroidery design and production, where she witnessed some of the global and environmental implications of distantly-made design choices. While overseeing production sites and artisanal workshops in India, China and Italy, she learnt that whilst design decisions are made primarily concerning aesthetic and economic values, the consequences often create unnecessary waste at multiple stages of manufacture. Her work has since responded to the tension between human wants and the increasingly urgent demands of environmental sustainability. Elissa explains, “My work aims to find practical solutions and implement circular design thinking to tackle today’s material challenges. I conduct my research through hands-on making, experimentation, user research and expert collaboration.”

Elissa’s collaborative investigations into sustainable production are numerous. E5 Ground sees her collaborate with E5 Bakehouse and designer Nathalie Spencer to create sustainable packaging materials from breadmaking waste. In 2019, Elissa commenced a collaboration with material scientists at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden to develop bio-iridescent sequins made from cellulose - the most abundant plant-based polymer. In 2021, she co-Founded AusBlau Studio with Christoph Dichmann, a platform to investigate systems that surround materials.

Their first project responds to London’s water pipe systems; around 600 million litres of drinkable water is lost to leaks per day, enough to meet the needs of 20 million people. To resolve this, AusBlau Studio researched the possibilities of material self-assembly and self-repair, to design a water supply network that can counteract changes in their environment to withstand breakages. Most recently, Elissa founded Radiant Matter, a design-led material innovation start-up, developing and scaling sustainable and high performing colour and material solutions for the circular economy, particularly for the fashion and textile market.

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Pipe Anatomy (2021) Self-repairing water pipes Bio Irridescent Sequin (2019) Sequins made from wood cellulose

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Finalists

Riccardo Cenedella Materials Innovation

After graduating from a BA in Product Design, Riccardo Cenedella started to work in an art-design studio where he learnt the craft of hand-made furniture; “I enjoyed the process, the feeling of dust on my hands and being able to say, ‘I made this!’” Riccardo grew up in a small city near the industrial Turin, where he would see large amounts of industrial waste abandoned in the courtyard of local factories. As a maker with a sustainable ethos, Riccardo saw design as a tool to create awareness about overconsumption and waste production. Process and narrative came first and the form followed. He enrolled in MA Material Futures at Central Saint Martins and decided to set the limit of his practice to the use of waste materials as his primary resource. His work now explores the ways in which we can transform thrown away material into functional objects and is particularly influenced by Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione, which advocated for small-scale and on-demand production with simple, yet functional, form.

Basing his own studio in East London after completing his Masters, some of his very recent projects include Carpet Matter, a collection of furniture made using carpet waste as the primary resource, while Alimenta uses Riccardo’s food waste produced during lockdown to experiment with ad-hoc materials to create household objects such as pots and vases. His Urban Waste Project used household waste collected in the streets of Riccardo’s East London neighborhood to create new, functional products such as speakers in order to demonstrate the potential in our bins.

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Carpet Matter Stool (2021)

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Finalists

Guan Lee Materials Innovation

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Project Etna (2022) Ceramic Chair, Clay, Recycled dust by M-A-L (Material Architecture Lab) Student Researcher: Sam Twaite opposite

Pavilion Rotunda at Grymsdyke Farm (2021) Hempcrete, Wire mesh by M-A-L (Material Architecture Lab) Student Researcher: Nora Brudevold, Matteen Haj Seyed Javadi, Hyelyn Lee, Danai Mavridi.

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Guan Lee is an architect, lecturer, founder of Grymsdyke Farm and co-director of UCL Bartlett’s Material Architecture Lab (M-A-L). He believes that “material exploration is fundamental to material innovation”. He thus explores digital fabrication in conjunction with hands-on building processes using a range of materials, including clay, concrete and plaster. Grymsdyke Farm, in Lacey Green, Buckinghamshire, was created to establish and explore the value of a collective living and working practice. That involves an intimate engagement with materials and processes of making in a specific place. Through the farm, in collaboration with M-A-L, Guan has created inventive uses of materials such as hempcrete – a hemp-based concrete alternative.

These collaborations seek to expose, articulate and demonstrate the essential connections between processes of design, making and place. For Guan, speculative and intuitive approaches to material manipulation for their own sake are as important as the demand for practicality and functionality. Materials produced through experimentation at the farm include lightweight architectural ceramics created by mixing dust collected from CNC milling with clay. These clay mixtures can be fired almost wet and can achieve a final thickness far beyond objects made with traditional clay. Another material sees recyclable plastic combined with offcut denim to create ornamental bricks. These can be sliced into different thicknesses for different applications from structural elements to decorative veneer.

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Finalists

Patrick Morris Materials Innovation

Patrick Morris grew up in a pottery studio in New Zealand, and from an early age was actively involved in production. Fascinated by malleable materials, his own research into materials development began with atmospheric carbon absorbed by trees and removed as a waste stream of the paper industry in volumes of millions of tons per year. Patrick resolved to address this; “here was an abundant resource of what is essentially atmospheric carbon and all of it going straight back into the atmosphere, either as methane released by cows when used in cattle feed, or directly as CO2 when burnt as low-cost fuel. I wanted to find a better use for it.”

With further research and experimentation, Patrick found that certain elements of this paper waste could be 3D printed and heat treated, leaving him with a 3D Carbon article. In 2015 Patrick founded Carbon Forest Products, to develop a material using a new 3D Printed Carbon material manufactured from paper waste compositions to create new forms of thermal management, battery components and even regenerative biomedical implants such as bone scaffolds. Their raw materials are sourced from forestry feedstock and have significantly lower carbon impacts than the copper, aluminium and titanium materials they will displace.

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Florence, carbon bone scaffold

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Finalists

Max Barton & Jethro Cooke (Slowstepper) Music For Change Supported by PRS Foundation

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Slowstepper (2021) Credit Ilme VysniauSkaite opposite

(cut 2)- Terra Album Artwork (2022) Projection Still

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Slowstepper is a new experimental music outfit founded by two composer / theatre-maker / activists, Max Barton and Jethro Cooke. The pair have been making music-theatre hybrid work since 2018 as the award-winning company Second Body.

Max Barton is a composer, director and playwright based in Kent. He trained in both music and theatre directing, and has spent his career exploring ways to fuse artforms in order to engage listeners and audiences in compelling new ways. This thread has run through all his work, from tiny experimental interdisciplinary gigs through to large-scale musical work performed internationally for thousands of people a night.

Jethro Cooke is a composer, sound designer and theatre-maker based in Devon.

He studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and works across film, theatre, performance and installed media, specialising in electronic music and live sound processing. As a composer, Jethro is interested in combining synthesis, sampling and acoustic instruments to build texturally and emotive pieces that blur boundaries between the analogue and digital.

During the pandemic, as Slowstepper, the duo has been working on a concept album called ‘Terra’, inspired by Gaia theory and climate science. Each track is “sung” by a different organism, and the music is created using cutting edge sound and climate science. They plan to release this as the debut album from Slowstepper in 2022. Current work-in-development includes ‘The End of the World’, a concert that juxtaposes global apocalypse scenarios with personal stories about mortality and disability. Using a mixture of music, narration and visual storytelling Max and Jethro contemplate the various ways the human race could meet its end. Similarly, ‘The Animals’ explores how the language of the individual fail us when we talk about climate change, asking us; “what can bees, trees, slime moulds and arctic foxes teach us about responsibility and collaboration?”

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Finalists

Eliza Shaddad Music For Change Supported by PRS Foundation

Eliza Shaddad is a Cornwall-based musician and songwriter of Scottish-Sudanese origin. Her work centres around raw, emotive, confessional lyricism, guitar riffs and expansive production. As an independent music artist she has released three EPs and two LPs, championed by tastemakers such as Zane Lowe (Beats 1) and Lauren Laverne (BBC Radio 1) and supported by the likes of The Sunday Times, the Independent, and FADER. Shaddad has toured the UK and Europe with her band, playing at SXSW 2019 in Austin Texas, and playing dates with the likes of Kae Tempest, Oh Wonder, Keane, and Turin Brakes. She has also collaborated with the likes of Grammy-winners’ Clean Bandit, award-winning poet Anthony Anaxagorou, and contemporary jazz group Hansu-Tori.

Eliza is a graduate of Philosophy and Jazz, and during her studies participated in an emboldening movement of students working towards stronger environmental policies and an eco-focused charitable festival in Birmingham. Eliza is a founding member of the female arts collective Girls Girls Girls, which works to empower women within the arts and to raise awareness and funding for the anti-female genital mutilation charity Orchid Project.

In July 2021 Eliza released her new album The Woman You Want via Rosemundy Records/Wow and Flutter - the culmination of a year’s work, made at her home in Cornwall during the pandemic. The album is accompanied by symbolic artwork and four music videos directed by herself and long-time collaborator Jodie Canwell. The artwork takes inspiration from the natural world, longing for Spring, and roaming the Cornish beaches. From her debut single, Waters, Eliza’s work often contemplates our relationship with nature. Eliza also recently participated in environmental projects, Weather - a climate change-focused multimedia opera, and Sea7 - an online Ocean Activist training camp. Having been dismayed by the recent and ongoing events in Darfur, Sudan - and the connections between the migrant crisis and climate change, Eliza, said she, “believes music can be a powerful forum to help communicate the stories of women whose lives have been deeply affected by the climate crisis and environmental change.” opposite

Eliza Shaddad, top image credit Mel Tjeong

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Finalists

Love Ssega Music For Change Supported by PRS Foundation

Love Ssega is a British-Ugandan musician, performing artist and songwriter. He has built a varied career collaborating across art forms, while also speaking up for social, educational and environmental issues.

His music and compositions, blending a vibrant mix of New Wave, 80s Hip-Hop, African polyrhythms and NYC Disco into smart modern Pop, have been played internationally from South London to LA and the Sydney Opera House. His work has received radio support across BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 3 and BBC 6Music’s flagship new music programmes. Love Ssega has collaborated internationally, working in Berlin, Paris, New York, Seoul and China.

Love Ssega is also known as a founding member of Clean Bandit - co-producing “Mozart’s House” for the future Grammy winners - all whilst studying at Cambridge University doing a PhD in Chemical Engineering. Alongside his music practice, he holds ambassadorial and trustee positions with a focus on youth opportunities in music and educational outreach. Most recently he was invited by Brian Eno to join the founding committee of his environmental charity EarthPercent.

Love Ssega’s overall music and artistic vision continues to evolve, more recently turning his attention to public-focussed art with a strong emphasis on climate justice and environmental activism. His last commission for Season For Change, “Airs of the South Circular”, used music to highlight how air pollution afflicts the Black community in South London and reached over 100,000 residents in Lewisham. Love Ssega also features in Music Declares Emergency’s campaigns “No Music On A Dead Planet” and “Turn Up The Volume.”

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Love Ssega. Credits Ben Millar Cole (top) and Nick Obank (bottom)

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Finalists

Hanna Tuulikki Music For Change Supported by PRS Foundation

Hanna Tuulikki is a British-Finnish artist, composer and performer based in Scotland, specialising in working with the voice. Her multi-disciplinary projects blend textural tapestries of vocal composition with costumed choreography in live performance, moving image and audio-visual installation. In her practice, she investigates the ways in which the body communicates beyond and before words, to tell stories through imitation, vocalisation and gesture.

Environmental concerns have been the focus of much of her work to date. With a place-responsive process, she considers how bodily relationships and folk histories are encoded within specific environments and ecologies. She often draws on embodied vernacular knowledges, in particular, practices of vocal and gestural ‘mimesis’ (imitation) of the more-than-human, to offer alternative approaches to making kin. Her recent work engages with questions about what it means to live on a damaged planet, proposing contemporary, queer ritual as a means to process the trauma that comes with ecological awareness.

Recent projects include: Into the Mountain (2019) a vocal composition for a women’s choir accompanying Simone Kenyon’s choreography, inspired by the writing of Nan Shepherd; Deer Dancer (2019/2021), a body of work examining how deer imitation in dance constructs ‘wilderness’ as the site for the cultivation of hetero-masculinity, impacting on ecologies, featuring moving image, sound, visual scores, and durational performance; and Under Forest Cover / Metsänpeiton Alla (2021), an audiovisual installation and site-specific performance exploring Finnish folklore, climate anxiety and ecological grief.

Hanna’s work has been commissioned and presented by organisations in the UK, Europe, USA, India and Australia, and can currently be experienced at the British Art Show 9 (2021-22) touring exhibition, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2021-23) New Arrivals exhibition and the Biennale of Sydney (2022). top

Cloud Cuckoo Island (2016) Video still bottom

Hanna Tuulikki, credit Perttu Saksa

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Finalists

Lee Hart Theatre-Makers Supported by The Maria Björnson Memorial Fund

Lee Hart is a director, devisor, and practitioner, making ambitious theatre experiences with, and for, some of the hardest to reach members of our communities. Since 2012 Lee has worked closely with the Theatre Royal Plymouth to develop, deliver, and creatively direct the Our Space project - a theatre-making programme working with adults who may have faced challenges involving homelessness, isolation, mental health issues, substance misuse or re-offending.

Our Space is a large-scale creative programme working in the community, in the theatre, and making public work with artists with lived experience. After initially training as an actor at Rose Bruford College, Lee began to explore movement direction and choreography in 2003 with Birds of Paradise on the award-winning Irish Giant, creating a physical language for a company of disabled and non-disabled actors. In 2008 Lee formed Salt Factory with playwright Nell Leyshon, with the ambition of creating bold, ambitious performance, through the grassroots engagement of the local community.

In 2019 Lee formed Voodoo Monkeys with Our Space participant Jason Brownlee.

The company are currently rehearsing, Today I Killed My Very First Bird - written

by Jason and based on his experiences of childhood trauma, violence, addiction, and redemption. In 2022 Voodoo Monkeys will begin work on a new project with Iranian born Fariboz Ferridouni, a survivor of the Iran/Iraq war and political exile, living in Plymouth.

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Boots at the Door (2015) bottom

Underbelly (2020)

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Finalists

Anna Himali Howard Theatre-Makers Supported by The Maria Björnson Memorial Fund

Anna Himali Howard is a director, theatremaker and dramaturg. She directs cocreated shows with a focus on active listening - creating fun, challenging creative spaces for participants, listening to what emerges, and then giving that material a dramaturgical framework that makes it sing. Inspired by community spaces, diaspora and moments of connection, Anna’s work often draws on the aesthetics of libraries, church halls, or function rooms. She was chosen to collaborate with teenage climate change activists in Gloucester to create I Stand For What I Stand On (2021). Prompting the cast to create their own materials in writing and performance, the show is performed into the audience’s headphones, giving the young activists a rare opportunity to be heard without having to shout.

In BE Next, two performances were created with a group of young people from Birmingham aged 14-21, for most of whom English is an additional language.

Using exercises to generate material, the performances were led by what the young people brought into the room, whether that was songs, dance or text, challenging and pushing the boundaries of what they considered worthy of staging or watching. Upcoming work sees Anna collaborate with South Asian women to devise work about the experience of polycystic ovary syndrome.

Through this work, she is interested in making space for people to explore the ways in which they want to be heard, and building community resilience.

Anna’s work has been staged at theatres including the Bush Theatre, the Gate Theatre, the Orange Tree and Birmingham REP. She trained on the Birmingham REP Foundry, as the Paines Plough Trainee Director, on the NT Studio Directors’ Programme and the Royal Opera House Directors’ Course. She was a Creative Associate at the Gate Theatre and is currently an Associate Artist at Brixton House.

Her work with international companies includes directing for BE Festival, New Nordics, and the Royal Court International Playwrights Residency.

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I Stand For What I Stand On (2021)

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Finalists

Helen Monks & Matt Woodhead (LUNG) Theatre-Makers Supported by The Maria Björnson Memorial Fund

Helen Monks and Matt Woodhead’s campaign-led verbatim theatre company LUNG uses people’s actual words to tell their stories and make hidden voices heard. LUNG tours work nationally to advocate and campaign against political, social and economic inequalities in modern Britain.

In 2016, LUNG worked in collaboration with four local young carers to amplify their voice. 70% of young carers are hidden – meaning their caring duties are unknown with no recognition or support. Who Cares toured school and youth zone venues across the UK, performing to over 8,000 pupils, children and young people, teachers and youth professionals culminating in an event at the House of Lords for key policy and decision-makers. The play was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and 200 hidden young carers were identified and signposted to support as a direct result of seeing the show.

In 2018, E15 responded to the events of 19th October 2013, in which 29 sheltering single mothers and children in East London got an eviction letter from Newham Council. Faced with forced relocation out of London, the young mums fought back. In collaboration with the real-life mums and campaign group, LUNG cocreated a piece of agitprop theatre that confronted the social housing crisis and celebrated how one group of women refused to be marginalised.

Alongside their shows, LUNG is proud to have launched the Who Cares Campaign advocating for the rights of young carers across the UK. During lockdown, LUNG launched a Digi-Fund to buy young carers the digital devices they need to catch up on school work and care for a loved one. The young carers LUNG work with have been featured on the BBC, ITV and Channel 5.

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E15 (2018) bottom

Who Cares? (2016)

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Finalists

Conrad Murray Theatre-Makers Supported by The Maria Björnson Memorial Fund

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The Frankenstein Collective

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Conrad Murray began his work in hip hop theatre on discovering he was unable to find books, shows or practitioners that related to his creativity and experience.

Growing up on a south London council estate, Conrad was immersed in a community of many different demographics and felt actively excluded from mainstream theatre cultures. Starting his hip hop theatre company in 2006 with like-minded individuals from similar backgrounds, The Beatbox Academy is a home-grown performance collective for artists aged 8-29 years, pro-actively engaging with harder to reach groups in areas of significant deprivation in Wandsworth.

In 2018 Conrad formed The ‘Frankenstein’ collective from The Beatbox Academy, drawing together an auditioned group of skilled beatboxers, singers and rappers.

Their show Frankenstein: How to Make a Monster interprets Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein from their own perspective as young people growing up in 21stcentury Britain. The show was adapted for television with BBC Channel 4 in 2020.

Further works include Gl4-MATSON ESTATE, in which Conrad collaborated with young people involved in drug dealing, and Air B2B: Britain to Brazil Residency, in which he travelled to the Xingu Indigenous Reserve and co-created with the Kuikuro tribe, learning about their music and playing their instruments. Together they created a brand-new song, the first in 200 years in the tribe. Conrad recorded the new song, which consisted of them beatboxing, singing and rapping, on his laptop, and then created a music video with the people. In March 2022 Conrad is releasing ‘Making hip hop theatre-Beatbox and Elements’ with Bloomsbury, and an anthology of three of his plays titled ‘Beats & Elements: A hip hop theatre trilogy’.

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Conrad Murray

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Finalists

Rhea Dillon Visual Arts Supported by the Yoma Sasburg Estate

Interdisciplinary artist Rhea Dillon references queer thought and feminist theory in her examination and abstraction of the ‘rules of representation’, using sculpture, painting, poetry and olfaction as devices to undermine contemporary Western culture. Rhea writes, “Blackness is naturally abstract. So as a Black expressionist, I am a question-er and a trickster.”

Uchronia et Uchromia (2020) takes the form of an online questionnaire, highlighting the processes and power structures framing the Black experience today. By adopting this framework, ideas of power, control and inequality come to the fore. Atlas’ Duppeee Whoopeee Seat: women should stop cleaning faeces, everyone should clean faeces (2020) places a brown balloon with speckles of bodily oils in the seat of a wheelchair. Referencing Françoise Vergès, Rhea reflects on impositions on black femininity, simultaneously treated as a corporate joke and a societal cushion, while attempting to emancipate Black women’s bodies from objectification. Likewise, tell me some / before you go (2020) sees Rhea question the ability to evade Europatriarchy and what it means to leave duty/community.

Using oil, acrylic and pencil on newspapers released in London on the day Meghan Markle & Prince Harry announced they would be leaving the monarchy, she suggests that you must abstract yourself to go on living for yourself and only yourself.

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Atlas’ Duppeee Whoopeee Seat: women should stop cleaning faeces, everyone should clean faeces (2020). Balloon, disinfectant, body oils & found object.

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Finalists

Sadé Mica Visual Arts Supported by the Yoma Sasburg Estate

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Dulux Abyss Revised (2018) opposite

Parts (2021)

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Sadé Mica tests the extent to which their body is both freed and restricted within gender and performance, their perception, their queerness and their interactions with the world. Using poetry, film, photography and textiles, Sadé documents the evolution of their understanding and identity, choosing to use their practice as a vector to explore their fluidity and impermanence in a space removed from their personal relationships.

ALWAYS 23 AT EVA (2018) sees the artist dancing in EVA bar, Manchester, while a poem interjects throughout discussing their feelings towards perception, posture and movement, examining their gender performance while blocking out other’s gazes with their headphones and thereby denying gendered expectations.

In the Binder Series (2020) the hidden garment used by trans and gender nonconforming people to feel more aligned with their bodies is turned into an outerwear piece, some embroidered with poetry, highlighting and celebrating visible markers of transness. It Teks Time (2020) is a large bedsheet embroidered with the notes from Sadé’s counselling sessions, accompanied by a film of an outdoor counselling session they conducted with themself in Malham, Yorkshire.

Sadé explains, “I explore how my body is both freed and restricted, liberating myself and my limbs in the British countryside, posturing against vast landscapes foreign to me, capturing the stillness of my form and thoughtful movements as well as those more chaotic and less considered.”

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Finalists

Shenece Oretha Visual Arts Supported by the Yoma Sasburg Estate

Shenece Oretha believes in sound’s mobilising potential, and maintains listening as an embodied practice. “I pay close attention to not just the music but the musicality of Black and Caribbean speech, traditions, spiritual practice, and literature. I draw inspiration from the approaches to listening and sound in the texts of Black women writers and the improvisatory and expressive strategies of Black avant-garde music.” Through multi-channel sound installations, she focuses on the electronic speaker’s body in relation to the human body. In Conspiracy: After Jeanne Lee (2021) Shenece’s series of speakers stand as figures, with bones placed in their diaphragms. Beginning with two deep breaths, they emit disparate tones which eventually join in a shared harmony before fading to silence.

Oral tradition, conversation, and gathering play a vital role in her work. In works such as TESTING GROUNDS (2019) and Who Can’t Hear Must Feel (2018), recordings of figures in her community resound with Shenece disseminating their words as well as archiving their voices. Dearly Beloved (2019) is a sculptural sound work inspired by a passage from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh”. Shenece negotiates the question what is it to be moved by what you hear, playing an inaudible bass through speakers festooned with and vibrating strings of gold tambourine disks.

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Shenece Oretha performing Testing Grounds, Cafe OTO (2019) bottom

Called to Respond (2020)

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Finalists

Libita Sibungu Visual Arts Supported by the Yoma Sasburg Estate

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I’m not my, performed at Dyson Gallery (2018) opposite

Quantum Ghost, Photogram (series 1-10) (2019) at Spike Island, Bristol. Credit Max Mcclure

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Bristol based Libita Sibungu grew up in Cornwall, this experience has informed their ongoing exploration into space and place spoken through the movements of black and brown bodies in rural landscapes. With collective work, storytelling and performance, Sibungu gathers and samples displaced voices into holding and healing environments to explore sites of remembrance. The project continuum; Quantum Ghost (2019) is a lament to memory comprising a series of large-scale photograms, an immersive sound installation, and a programme of live performances. Mapping a journey through archives and territories related to Sibungu’s heritage, connecting the mining regions of Namibia and Cornwall, revealing how the echoes of colonialism and diasporic migration reverberate through the deep-time of geology.

In performance, Sibungu uses electronic tools such as guitar pedals, mics and vocal effects to construct themselves as a host of polyphonic identities and memories. This assemblage approach expands to explorations of collaboration, and the generative potential in processing documentation of live works. Her 2019 performance I am not my, my injuries are healed now but I still don’t remember things, O.E.Butler, sees a live reading of a script improvised with voice distortion to create multiple tones, pitches and characters, responding to the energy of the room, audio and the positioning of an instructional text. Accompanied by a live electronic soundscape, the set consists of a floor covered in silver survival blankets, masking beneath it a pool of wet clay which the body sinks into, leaving behind a trace of time and movement.

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Interim Director Mary Jane Edwards Chair of Trustees Howell James CBE Board of Trustees John Booth Chair, The National Gallery, The Prince’s Trust, and Tate Trustee Dennis Chang Director, Bolton & Quinn Andrew Comben Chief Executive, Brighton Dome and Brighton Festival Jan Dalley Arts Editor, Financial Times Virginia Hodge Creative Director, HodgeSellers Frith Ker Founder, Studio Frith Monika Parrinder Design writer, Educator and Facilitator Jonathan Reekie CBE Director, Somerset House Trust Kully Thiarai Creative Director & CEO, Leeds 2023 Matthew Slotover Co-founder, Frieze London

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Ambassadors Siobhan Davies CBE Sir Richard Eyre Sir Antony Gormley Asif Kapadia Wayne McGregor CBE Rufus Norris Alexandra Shulman CBE Ali Smith

Klien receiving the award for Experimental Music with Asif Kapadia, 2020

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Support Us Established in 1993, the Arts Foundation is a registered charity that supports individual artists and creatives in the UK with unconditional financial support. It remains unique by highlighting the value of artistic practice and creative thought, while connecting people and practices across Craft, Design, Fine Art, Literature, Music, New Media and Film, and the Performing Arts.

With demand never greater, we need to find new sources of support that can be directed into the pockets of UK artists and creatives at a pivotal time in their development to achieve levels of success that might otherwise not be possible.

The impact of our fellowship scheme and Arts Foundation Futures Awards is succinctly highlighted by Arts Foundation Fellow, and Artistic Director of the National Theatre, Rufus Norris:

“It certainly had the most profound effect on my career because it did exactly what it was meant to do. In that, it brought me time, time to follow my own initiative, my own instinct rather than trying to persuade anyone else that I could follow theirs. In that year I laid the foundation of my own art for projects which took me, rung by rung, towards what has for some years been a very compelling and fortunate way to spend a working life.

So, I for one am eternally grateful.”

To find out more about supporting our work, please visit our website, or arrange an informal conversation with Mary Jane Edwards, please email: info@artsfoundation.co.uk

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Will Harris receiving the award for Poetry with Tracey Emin CBE and Chair of Trustees, Howell James, 2020

Become a Friend By becoming a Friend of the Foundation you can directly support the livelihoods and future generation of artists and creatives in the UK. All donations, big and small, go straight to artists as part of our Arts Foundation Futures Awards Fellowship Scheme, with friends enjoying a range of benefits, including invitations to special, one-off artist events and gatherings.

Support an Award Individuals, philanthropists, organisations, trusts and foundations can enable artistic and creative practice in the UK to flourish by supporting an award. Working in close collaboration with the Arts Foundation you can devise and support an award across a wide range of artforms. The award is expertly managed by the foundation and engages an established network of curators, artists, academics, writers, and industry professionals

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2021 John Barber Choral Composition Shneel Malik Materials Innovation Joanna Pocock Environmental Writing Tanoa Sasraku Visual Arts

2016 Laura Ducceschi Producers of Live Music Ruth Ewan Art in the Urban Space Carmen Hijosa Materials Innovation Vann Kwok Jewellery Design Greg Sinclair Children’s Theatre Deborah Smith Literary Translation

2020 Klein Experimental Music Onyeka Igwe Experimental Film Esther McManus Comics Ima-Abasi Okon Visual Art Bethany Williams Social Innovation in Materials Design

2015 Sarat Babu Materials Innovation Gregory Batsleer Choral Conducting Angie Bual Arts Producer Alex Hartley Art in the Elements Hollie McNish Spoken Word Yoav Segal Video & Digital for Performance

2019 Kwame Asafo-Adjei Hip Hop Dance Will Harris Poetry Holly Hendry Experimental Architecture Jamila Johnson-Small Visual Arts Oscar Lhermitte Designer Maker

2014 Alice Birch Playwriting Leah Capaldi Sculpture Andrew Cranston Painting Isobel Harbison Arts Journalism Julia Lohmann Materials Innovation Rie Nakajima Experimental Music

2018 Alexander Baczynski-Jenkins Visual Arts Jochen Holz Craft Nathaniel Mann Composition Lydia Ourahmane Visual Arts Alexander Zeldin Theatre Directing

2013 Rachael Champion Sculpture Pippa Cleary Composition for Musicals Chloe Lamford Design for Performance Regina Moriarty Screenwriting Euegenia Ivanissevich Still Life Photography Isabel Rock Printmaking

2017 Evan Ifekoya Live Art Lauren Kinsella Jazz Composition Julian Melchiorri Materials Innovation Samuel Stevens Essay Films Joanna Walsh Creative Non-Fiction

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Holly Hendry Invertibrate (2021) De La Warr Pavillion

2012 Wilkie Branson Choreography Elspeth Brooke Opera Composition Ruth Claxton Sculpture Markus Kayser Product Design Robert Morgan Animation Ahren Warner Poetry

2008 Ken Cockburn Literary Translation Nicholas Collon Conducting Swava Harasymovicz Illustration Stephen Hurrell Lighting Design Sarah Staton Sculpture in Wood Tomoaki Suzuki Sculpture in Wood

2011 Matt Golden Sculpture Harminder Judge Live Performance Art Sam Lee Folk Music Adam Marek Short Story Writing Dawn Youll Ceramics

2007 Belinda Chapman Creators of Theatre for Children Eleanor Long Glass Mark McNay New Fiction Leonie Purchas Photojournalism Dan Wilson Electro-Acoustic Composition

2010 Ole Birkland Cinematography Kate Brown Graphic Novels Julie Cook Textile Art Andrew Lamb Jewellery Design Mervyn Millar Puppetry

2006 Patrick Fredrikson Furniture Design Ingrid Laubrock Jazz Composition Karen Laws Comedy Writing Tim Turnbull Performance Poetry Lynette Yiadom-Boake Painting

2009 Cath Aran Storytelling Emily Baker Songwriting Simon Fujiwara Interior Architecture Clare Lizzimore Theatre Directing Veronique Rollande Portraiture

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2005 Katrina Lindsay Costume Design Liv Lorent Choreography Jeremy Millar Curation Thomson and Craighead New Media Art Matthias Tsahourides Instrumentalist

2000 Laia Gasch Arts Producer David Harrison Painting Michael Simpson Painting Hannah Starkey Photography Belcea Quartet Chamber Music

2004 Robert Bradbrook Animation Simon Carroll Ceramics Zinnie Harris Playwriting Conor Mitchell Composition for Musicals Brothers Quay Animation

1998 Paul Clark Opera Composition Ken Eastman Ceramics Deirdre Gribbin Opera Composition Sarah Kane Playwriting Permindar Kaur Sculpture Erika Tan Digital Art

2003 Angela De Castro Circus Frances Geesin Textiles Frith Kerr Graphic Design Carol Morley Documentary Making Amelia Noble Graphic Design Katrina Porteous Poetry

1997 Lise Autogena Glass Mateusz Farenholz Printmaking Jeremy James Choreography Neil Jeffries Drawing Emma Woffenden Glass 1996 Martin Andre Conducting Tanya Burns Lighting Design Joy Gregory Photography Alice Oswald Poetry Mike Phillips Thriller Writing Wales & Wales Furniture Design

2002 John Frankland Sculpture Sophia Kokosalaki Fashion Design Rufus Norris Theatre Directing Anne Seagrave Live Performance Art Simon Vincenzi Live Performance Art 2001 Lin Cheung Jewellery Design Michel Faber Short Story Writing Susanna Heron Landscape Design Asif Kapadia Film Directing Lisa Lillywhite Theatre Design Fred Meller Theatre Design Ali Smith Short Story Writing

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Bethany Williams London Fashion Week 2019

1995 Aldona Cunningham Theatre Design Jane Harris Painting Jeremy Herbert Theatre Design Andrew Kotting Scriptwriting Michael Lloyd Metalwork Gavin Lockheart Painting David Sawer General Composition Tommy Smith Jazz Composition Matthew Tickle Installation Ann Whitehurst Painting Hermione Wiltshire Installation Mark Whitelaw Mixed Media James Wood Electro Acoustic Composition

1994 Melanie Counsell Painting Susan Gritton Singing Jane Harris Textiles Wayne McGregor Choreography Louisa Minkin Painting Jocelyn West Singing Mark Whitelaw Mixed Media James Wood Electro Acoustic 1993 Philip Eglin Ceramics Linda France Poetry Ken Grant Photography Sara Radstone Ceramics Ed Thomas Playwriting

To view our full Artist Directory, listing all the Arts Foundation Fellows and Finalists since 1993, please visit our website.

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Our Supporters The David Collins Foundation The David Collins Foundation was set up in memory of the late designer David Collins to honour his legacy and celebrate his love of the Arts. Since its creation in 2016, the Foundation has partnered with the Arts Foundation to support artists across multiple disciplines. davidcollins.studio/foundation

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The Maria Björnson Memorial Fund The Maria Björnson Memorial Fund was set up to honour the exceptional theatre, ballet and opera designer Maria Björnson who died in 2002. Maria’s best-known design was for the Phantom of the Opera for which she received a plethora of awards, although she designed for many other organisations including the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, the Royal Opera, the Royal Ballet, Glyndebourne Opera, English National Opera, Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera, Sydney Opera, La Scala, in the West End and on Broadway. The fund also supports artistic enterprises, artsrelated activities and individual artists in the UK. mbmf.org.uk

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Savinder Bual Movements of a Flatfish (2020) Video still above

Anna Himali Howard I Wanna Be Yours (2019)

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PRS Foundation Since 2000 PRS Foundation has given more than £41 million to over 8,100 new music initiatives. 8 out of 12 Mercury Prize nominees this year have received PRS Foundation support and the charity has supported BRITS, Mercury, AIM and Ivors Award-winners.

PRS Foundation supports outstanding talent from all backgrounds, covering the whole of the UK and all genres, with grantee success stories include Little Simz, Wolf Alice, Dave, Sam Fender, Years & Years, AJ Tracey, Anna Meredith, Yola, Glass Animals, Ezra Collective, Jade Bird, Ghetts, Shiva Feshareki, Sarathy Korwar, Floating Points, Nadine Shah, The Fanatix, Imogen Heap, IDLES, Kae Tempest, Kojey Radical and Emily Burns.

Widely respected as an inclusive, collaborative and proactive funding body, PRS Foundation supports an exceptional range of new music activity through direct grants to music creators and through support for pioneering organisations, including venues, festivals, promoters and other talent development organisations. PRS Foundation founded the Women Make Music fund, co-founded global gender equality initiative, Keychange and most recently launched the Power Up initiative to tackle anti-Black racism in music. prsfoundation.com

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The Yoma Sasburg Estate Born in Amsterdam Yoma Sasburg was a professional ballet dancer, and later trained as a sculptor under David Weekes becoming a founder member of the Devon Guild of Craftsmen. Gifted by her daughter Roselyn in 2010, the Yoma Sasburg legacy has supported a variety of the Arts Foundation Futures Awards Fellowships for sculpture, installation art, live performance art and visual art.

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Love Ssega Airs Of The South Circular. Credit Ben Mole

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Janus pause leaking fortified enclaves (2020) Sapele Mahogany and fluids. Credit Theo Christelis.

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