CASW Student Award

As a way of supporting younger artists in making the transition to professional practice, CASW makes an annual award of £2000 to a higher degree student completing a fine art course in one of Wales’ universities.

Seren Ambrose-Ellis, a student at Glyndwr University Wrexham, is the recipient of the CASW Student Award 2023. As her portfolio (link below) suggests, Seren is an interdisciplinary artist drawn to the flawed and the decayed, exploring the aestheticization of physical and digital distortion. She studies the sociology of walls and the ways in which their gradual decay becomes a concrete reminder of their history.

Hole (2022), 

Flora McLachlan

Flora’s work investigates the act of making art. Although her work is rooted in etching and lithography, she has recently expanded into digital photography and film. She explains: ‘I want to examine, without dissecting or destroying it, the idea of inspiration; a breath from elsewhere which directs the artist in their work. An altered state is implied, a heightened mode of existence. I see this state as a receptive, shamanistic mode, so I use ritual and divination in my work to provoke unexpected connections. 

Ben Faircloth

Ben is a painter, animator and filmmaker in Machynlleth, Wales. His work, he says, ‘explores absurdity, isolation and anxiety, whilst being rooted in my immediate community and accompanying social issues. A sense of place provides affection, humor and ultimately levity to the, at times, dark subject matter. My current run of work is focused on the clichéd, but still evocative act of returning to your hometown after a long absence.’

CASW Student Award 2021

Craig Lewis

Craig Lewis, an MFA student at Cardiff Metropolitan University, is the recipient of the CASW Student Award for 2021. His work includes painted canvases, digital imagery/printing and collage. The portfolio below gives examples of his work and a context for his practice.

Julie Lane

In 2017, after a thirty-year career as an Art teacher, Julie Lane began the journey to regain her art practice by enrolling on the MA Art Practice, Fine Art course at USW.

Julie’s practice is concerned with creating expressive figurative paintings that reflect a personal and repressed memories. Her gestural brushstrokes examine the boundary of figuration and abstraction. Replacing the canvas with personal household furnishings brings a significance to each piece. Her consideration of the fabric encourages the audience to unravel motifs that evoke a common understanding of what could be a familiar experience https://julielaneartist.wixsite.com/mysite

Marina Iodice

My practice grows from the dialogue between the isolated individual and the social group. I work predominately through installation art, incorporating a range of media from the analogue to the digital. My theoretical and visual research lies in the themes of language, identity, physicality, femininity, innocence and sin, utilizing the motifs of fragmentation and repetition. My over- arching  mission is to build a new perception of the world, following the teaching of French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his ‘déconstruction’ theory. It is this particular notion that has been pushed further in my recent work, investigating the relationship between text and meaning. https://mariice.wixsite.com/home

Henriette Heimdal

Henriette’s practice is concerned with psycho geographical ideas in the urban and natural landscape. Inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin on the Flaneur, Henriette wanders from place to place, following the attractions of the terrain. Sometimes looking for something unattainable. Perhaps a way out, or a new way of seeing.

Whilst her background lays in photography, during her master’s she deconstructed the characteristics of photography, and looked at how photographs are traces of reality. Using a GPS whilst visiting various cities in Europe, Henriette traced her journeys, creating routes on a map. The traced lines were recreated in three-dimensional metal sculptures and exhibited in Swansea for the graduate show in January 2018, and later in Newtown for Oriel Davies Open in June.

Knowing she would receive the prize from the Contemporary Art Society of Wales, it enabled her to travel to Indonesia in March to search for new inputs and inspiration. When she visited Borneo, she was invited to speak at a secondary school about her education and arts practice.

Being a white, female solo traveller in a country like Indonesia made her feel alienated. A type of estrangement she had never experienced before. And it is this subject that she is currently exploring in the photographic series she has been working on since the trip.

The CASW submission is entitled  ‘attractions of the terrain’. Henriette said that when she is walking she follows her desire so if I find an intriguing path in the woods, or a narrow little alleyway I will go there and see where it leads to. The end of the path will take me somewhere else, and the alleyway might have a street in the end. I also let people I meet decide where I should go. When I was travelling I used an app called Couch-surfing, where I posted about my trip to different countries. Then people living in those countries would contact me, and I would plan my trip according to where they live.

Edward Jones

Edward is an Artist and Designer working from Swansea and Bristol. Driven by a fascination with modes of representation, simulation and mediation, he believes that there is something integral to the material qualities of glass, that can be drawn upon to interrogate our increasingly mediated construction of reality.

Further to an understanding of Edward Jones’ practice, are three major concerns:

– Firstly, the seemingly instinctive human drive to represent, replicate and reproduce – in greater and greater, similitude – existing aspects of the physical world.

– Secondly, the relationship between these representations and their origin; or more specifically, the threshold where our lived, physical, temporally unfolding reality meets with an increasingly manipulated, mediated, re-presented, version of that reality.

– And thirdly how these mediated experiences of representations feed back into, and affect our experience of our lived physical reality.

In 2018 Edward graduated with Distinction from the MA Glass: Contemporary Dialogues course at Swansea College of Art. During his time there he was the recipient of both the 2018 Jane Philips Award as well as the 2018 Contemporary Art Society of Wales Student Award. In addition, Edward won the competition to produce a hanging artwork for the new University of Wales Trinity Saint David, SA1 campus at Swansea waterfront. Since graduating Edward has taken up a lecturing post in Architectural Glass Design and has had his sculpture, Digital Borderlands (Clone Stamp Tool) selected for inclusion in Cornelia Parkers room at this years Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

Sarah Hollyfield

The recipient of the CASW Student Award for 2017 was Sarah Holyfield. Sarah originally studied the science of zoology developing a career in teaching. A lifelong interest in art led her as a mature student to undertake a degree n fine art at Bangor University graduating with first class honours in 2014. Continuing with the MA programme she has this year been awarded an MA in fine art with distinction.

Throughout her studies Sarah has been interested in the boundaries between science and art. Sarahs work is eclectic in terms of both media and ideas. She uses traditional materials like clay and stitching but also photography, video, sound and digital production. Similarly, she has a wide rang of conceptual interests, from asemic writing that looks legible but makes no sense, through to exploring ideas such as virtual reality and virtual money. In her own words Sarah asserts ….

‘Our recent experience of elections and socials media have shown a huge growth in ‘echo chambers’, and ‘fake news’ – how do we know what is real’