Charlie Buurman-Davies is a multidisciplinary artist exploring facets of illustration, animation and installation.

Her practice often revolves around the principles of time, movement, self and autonomy. Inspired by the idea of deconstruction, Davies dismantles and reinterprets elements of animation, film, and the human form. She examines what it means to be labelled as a ‘time-based artist’, posing the question ‘can a still image be a film if it depicts multiple moments in time?’

Her practice has been developed with a collaborative direction in mind, and many of her works require viewer interaction in order to be fully activated.

Antonia Hazlewood’s vibrant abstract paintings explore the intrinsic forces of nature.

The dynamic and ever-changing process is an inquiry into the human experience. Hazlewood creates her canvases via a dynamic and ever-changing process in an attempt to capture the rhythm and flux of human experience. She sees every action as evolution, adaptation and absorption. Layers of change combine on the surface in a chemical fusion. She says, ‘like a Rhizome, if you look closely you will notice a labyrinth of interconnection and with it, a story.’

Jessica Mill’s practice stems from a fascination with the divergent worlds of touch and sight,  enjoying the contradiction between the  intimacy of human touch  and the alienating effects of optical extremes.

Mills aims to intrigue the viewer by bringing together  vibrant, graphic uniformity and  gesture in her paintings, which she sees as an antidote to the persistent sense of anxiety that many people feel in today’s world.

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 2023.

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. .

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