Exhibition

Platform Graduate Award 2022

Foyle Gallery

This year Turner Contemporary presents the Platform Graduate Award 2022, the annual region-wide project created to support new graduate talent across the south east of England. This year’s exhibition includes four artists graduating from Fine Art courses at University for the Creative Arts (UCA).

This event has passed
27 October 2022

27 October 2022 - 29 January 2023

Turner Contemporary Rendezvous, Margate, Kent CT9 1HG

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The Platform Graduate Award is an initiative to support emerging graduate artistic talent to further their practice following graduation. Established in 2012, the award includes a £2,000 bursary and mentoring, and is awarded to an outstanding graduate from one of several participating regional higher education partners.

The initiative is led by CVAN South East (Contemporary Visual Arts Network South East) and in 2021, is a partnership between six galleries: Aspex Portsmouth, MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, Modern Art Oxford, Phoenix Art Space in Brighton, Plymouth College of Art, and Turner Contemporary in Margate. Following an exhibition and events programme across the four participating galleries, an artist from each gallery will be nominated for the award, with the winning artist announced in December 2022.

Platform focuses on artists in the first year after graduation; a critical time when the loss of the university support structure and financial pressures can test an artist’s dedication to their practice. For the participating galleries, this is a way to keep in touch with the most promising emerging practice, and with higher education institutions. More broadly, the scheme aims to stimulate artist networks outside of London and encourage artists to stay in the South East region.

In 2021 the Award was won by Ainoa Burgos Gonzalez, a graduate of Fine Art at the University of Brighton, who was nominated by Phoenix Art Space.

For information about the previous years’ winners exhibiting artists – Platform Graduate Award

Wiktoria Sikorska

27 October - 13 November 2022

Wiktoria Sikorska paints crisp, rigid lines in compositions that invoke an illusion of depth and perspective through the placement of different tones and textures. Sikorska draws inspiration from their surrounding area; mundane scenes of buildings captured initially through photography, and later reworked as sketches and paintings. These scenes have in themselves simple aesthetic appeal, where buildings and other urban features such as satellites and antennae form simple geometric compositions. Sikorska layers paint, scrapes it off, scratches into the canvas or wood, and draws over the paintings to create texture in order to make them more visually arresting. These small-scale paintings are placed onto wall installations that allow the artist to control the perceived size of the works, and engage with perspective and architectural design, creating an echo of the artist’s nostalgia. The aim of this process is to showcase the beauty that the artist has originally seen in real life without the distractions of context. 

Sara Jabot

16 November – 4 December 2022

Photographer Sara Jabot, known as PRBLMTCintuitions, was born in 1999 in London, where she lives and works.  Since 2016 her work has focused on portrait photography and street fashion. Graduating from UCA in 2022, with an honours in Fine art, she has established herself as a portrait photographer who embraces race in her art, capturing the beauty and essence of the black race, culture and its community. Jabot uses a Canon 1300D DSLR camera, printing on satin or gloss paper. 

Jabot is inspired by the lack of positive representation of black subjects in fashion photography and the beauty industry and wants to challenge the stereotypes and conventions around how black people are depicted. She creates her work in order to celebrate beauty within the black community and wants her subjects to feel seen as beautiful, understood and welcomed in an industry that is not always so kind. 

Simone Swaine

7 – 31 December 2022

Embraced by place, possessed by process, Simone explores all possibilities from the world around her. Examining the landscape and its scars in a rich narrative evoked by an emotional response and led by intuitive marks, she invites the viewer to peer through her eyes for a moment in time.  

Using fragments of found textiles and discarded objects from within the landscape, she questions the vibrancy of innate matter and the value we place on them. In a society of materialism where we use and discard freely and long after we have forgotten their existence; they continue, a life without prescribed uses but not entirely innate. 

Together with the artist’s visual mark-making and use of redundant materials, they come together to explore the past, present and future. 

Constandina Herodotou

5 January – 29 January 2023

Constandina Herodotou is a mixed media artist currently working in London. They recently graduated from UCA and were part of the attRAct programme in 2016 at the Royal Academy of Art. In 2021 they exhibited their work in group shows at The Margate School and CRATE Space. Their practice includes experimenting with different media, which they navigate physically through a “body-awareness” process. 

Colour and touch are two key elements that intertwine in their experience, described as a subtle form of synaesthesia. These interactions are first felt within and on their skin, through their fingers and out onto the page. As these recordings accumulate as books, reading them reveals shifts in perspectives that are mental, physical, automatic and ecstatic.