Inaugural winner of new national arts prize announced

Fine art graduate Holly Hendry has been named the first winner of a major national new art prize - the Woon Tai Jee Art Fellowship - hosted by Northumbria University.

Holly, a recent graduate of the Slade School of Art, receives a £20,000 bursary for her work R255 G145 B175 which deals with the confines of space and treating her environment as a framework from which to springboard her own ideas and ignite other people’s thoughts and imaginations. The bursary will be used to fund the cost of her Fellowship at the BxNU Institute for Contemporary Art at BALTIC 39 in Newcastle during the 2013/14 academic year. The institute is the result of a collaborative partnership between BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Northumbria University which was recently awarded the Times Higher Education award for excellence and innovation in the arts.

This is the inaugural year of this unique major arts prize hosted by Northumbria University with an annual prize total of £40,000 made possible by keen art collector and Northumbria University Law alumnus Mr Wee Teng Woon who is funding the prizes at his alma mater in memory of his family, after whom the prizes are named.

The standard of entries was extremely high and the judges also awarded further generous prizes with Benjamin Lee winning the Lim Ai Fang Art Prize worth £9,000 and Ewan Murray winning the Cheong Kam Hee Art Prize worth £6,000. The judges also awarded discretionary prizes of £2,000 to Bahia Haddam and three further discretionary prizes of £1,000 to Catriona Meighan, Rebecca Moss and Elysia Byrd due to the quality of their work.

The work of all of the ten short-listed artists is now part of a major exhibition in Gallery North at Northumbria University and is open to the public between 10am – 4pm weekdays until 26 July 2013.

This annual competition is open to final year undergraduate fine art students based in the UK and applications are short-listed by an expert judging panel Chaired by Northumbria University’s BALTIC Professor Christine Borland and made up of professionals in the cultural industry.

Northumbria University will be hosting the prize each year offering a unique and fantastic opportunity for a final year student of fine art in the UK to continue their professional development. The application process for the 2013/14 prize will be launched on 1 October 2013.

For more information on the Woon Foundation Painting and Sculpture Art Prize including the call for submissions to the 2014 prize and to follow the progress of the 2013 Woon Tai Jee Fellow please visitwww.northumbria.ac.uk/woonartprize