The panel of assessors that will be selecting the creative pieces to feature in the upcoming publication of the yellow book and on the music singles can be found below. Please click the images to meet the teams.
Jenny Escritt is a Photographer and Printmaker who lives and works in Birmingham.
After gaining a degree in Fine Art in 1979, where she specialised in printmaking, Jenny developed an interest in experimental photography, mostly using cameras (including pinhole experiments and Polaroid manipulation), and also exploring non-camera based techniques such as painting with darkroom chemicals and hand coloured photograms.
In the 1980s she ran a variety of photographic workshops in Leicester, which encouraged a creative and experimental approach to image making, seeking to develop ways of seeing, and helping some participants develop personal confidence.
In her own photographic work, Jenny has a particular interest in experimenting with the viewer’s perspective, using blur, reflection, focus and camera angle to spur enquiry and evoke emotional response. Content is often ‘every day’, for example: at home, walking, travelling in buses and trains.
After a gap of some years, Jenny resumed printmaking in 2009. She has concentrated on mono printing, using similar reference points to those used in her photography, and experimenting with different kinds of mark making and stencils. Recently she has been photographing the plate itself, before and after the print stage, initially to document the process but then becoming increasingly interested in the image this created in its own right. Jenny is keen to explore these growing interfaces between photography and printmaking.
Sally Waterman employs literary adaptation as a mechanism for self-portraiture, creating poetic still and moving image works that explore female subjectivity, memory and identity. Waterman re-invents the source material through a fragmentary re-scripting exercise, seeking autobiographical associations with certain images, themes, characters or conceptual ideas.
Indeed, the chosen text enables the recollection and re-imagining of repressed memories, whereby difficult, yet universal experiences of illness, conflict, loss and separation are illuminated through a cathartic transition from literature into visual art. Her PhD in Media & Photography at the University of Plymouth used T.S Eliot’s 1922 poem, ‘The Waste Land’ to examine her elusive self-representational strategies and interpretative methods.
Past group exhibitions have included ‘Shifting Horizons’; Derby Museum & Art Gallery and Midland Arts Centre (2000-2001), ‘Forest’; Nottingham Castle Museum, Oriel Davies Gallery, Wolverhampton Gallery and York Art Gallery (2004-2005) and ‘What Happens Next?’ Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London (2008). Her work is held in public and private collections including King St. Stephen Museum, Székesfehérvar, Hungary, the National Art Library at the V&A and the Yale Center for British Art, New York.
She has lectured at Plymouth College of Art and the University of Plymouth and was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London (2011-2012), where she organised the conference; ‘Family Ties: Recollection and Representation’.
Steven McLoughlin was born in 1970 and is a self-taught artist. Showing a serious interest in art from the age of 16, Steve initially drew pencil portraits. A flair for fine architectural drawings led Breedon Books to hand Steve his first commission at the age of 19, illustrating a series of street scenes of Old Derby. That eye for detail was also drawing Steve to wildlife subjects and also landscapes.
Steven has been painting professionally for over 10 years and during this time has become experienced in using many different mediums. He spends a lot of time on the coast, walking the North Norfolk and Cornish coastlines as well as the Derbyshire countryside where he lives.
‘I am aiming to provide an illusion of space and tranquillity by painting open skies and landscapes. I find pastels and acrylics give me the subtlety and depth I need to achieve this.’
Lucia Masundire has been working in arts development for over 6 years working at Leicestershire County Council and is currently managing a digital research project for Leicestershire Museums.
Having studied Arts Management at De Montfort University she has lived in Leicester for almost 10 years.
Her current project Click; Connect; Curate; Create is exploring how digital (technology and media) can be used to increase engagement with museum collections this includes; publishing collections content on social media platforms, exploring 3d scanning of museum objects and augmented reality apps.
She is trustee and Senior Fellow for Arts Development UK, the professional association for people working in Arts Development and the art organisation Leicester Print Workshop
Keith Cooper is a professional photographer based in Leicester, in the UK. As well as his fine art landscape photography he covers architecture, interiors, annual report photography, advertising and corporate events/PR for national and international clients. He also teaches, writes and lectures on photography and modern photographic techniques to individuals and companies. He specialises in bringing an appreciation of the latest technology to high quality Black and White photography.
Keith has been a renowned landscape photographer for many years. He shares Barbara Hepworth’s observation that “Landscape is strong – it has bones and flesh and skin and hair. it has age and history and a principle behind its evolution”
He says: “I love taking photos of just about anything. Some of my most personal work is expressed in my black and white landscape photography – it’s the sort of stuff that strikes a real emotional chord for me, and I love seeing it when a print on a wall just reaches out to someone else.
For the last decade, Russell Thompson has worked for Apples and Snakes, England’s leading organisation devoted specifically to the advancement of live poetry.
As such, he has devised tours, theatre shows and artist-development initiatives. He is now the organisation’s archivist.
Russell is a seasoned performing artist himself, appearing both as Rachel Pantechnicon and as one half of the pop-and-poetry duo Project Adorno.
In these guises, he has featured on BBC Radios 1, 3 and 4, and has appeared on the bill of events as diverse as WOMAD and the StAnza Poetry Festival.
Moniza Alvi was born in Pakistan and grew up in Hertfordshire.
After working for many years as a secondary school teacher in London, she is now a freelance writer and tutor, and lives in Wymondham, Norfolk with her husband and daughter.
Her first two collections were published by Oxford University Press: The Country at My Shoulder (1993), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Whitbread poetry prizes and selected for the New Generation poetry promotion, and A Bowl of Warm Air (1996).
Her later poetry titles have all been published by Bloodaxe and include Split World: Poems 1990-2005 (2008) and Europa (2008) and At the Time of Partition (2013). Both these last two books were Poetry Book Society Choices shortlisted for T.S. Eliot Prize.
In 2002-04 she was a trainee at the Westminster Pastoral Foundation studying counselling and group analysis.
Helen Ivory is a poet and assemblage artist. Her fourth Bloodaxe Books collection is the semi-autobiographical Waiting for Bluebeard (May 2013).
She has co-edited with George Szirtes In Their Own Words:Contemporary Poets on their Poetry Salt 2012.
She teaches for the Arvon Foundation, The Poetry School and mentors for the Poetry Society.
She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and is tutor and Course Director for the new UEA/Writers Centre Norwich online creative writing programme which launches in 2015.
She is married to the poet Martin Figura and they live in Norwich where they run the live-literature organization Café Writers.
Adam Horovitz was born in London in 1971, and moved to Slad, Gloucestershire the same year.
Active as a poet and performer since the early 1990s, he released his first pamphlet, Next Year in Jerusalem, in 2004 and a second, The Great Unlearning, in 2009.
He was the poet in residence for Glastonbury Festival’s official website in 2009 and was voted onto the Hospital Club 100 in 2010 as an ‘emerging talent’. His debut collection, Turning, was released by Headland in 2011.
He was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2012 and his most recent book, A Thousand Laurie Lees (a poetry-fuelled memoir about growing up in Cider with Rosie country), was published by the History Press in 2014.
He was a judge for the 2014 Manchester Poetry Prize and the 2014 Bare Fiction poetry competition.
