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Edna Lumb Travel Prize
30/04/04
A whole host of events has been organised by Leeds Metropolitan
University in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Edna
Lumb Travel Prize.
Edna, who died in 1992 at the age of 60, was a student at Leeds College of Art, which became part of Leeds Met (then Leeds Polytechnic) in the 1960s. She was a former beneficiary of a scholarship and placed tremendous value in her experience. Edna’s work was based on industrial landscapes and she was considered a poet of industrial heritage. The award, now totalling £2,000, is usually split between two Leeds Met art students to enable them to carry out travel study and broaden their horizons.
The presentation to this year’s winners, Philip McHugh and Gemma Sloan, included talks by Senior Curator of Leeds City Art Gallery, Corinne Miller, and 2003 awards winners Lucy Watkins, who went to Japan, and Jon Abbott, who visited Malaya.
In conjunction with this, until Saturday 29 May Leeds Met Gallery will be presenting work by four of the past prize winners, who have established national and international reputations. The four featured artists are Lucy Irvine, Lucy Pedlar, Rob Vale and Pip Dickens. To contextualise the exhibition there will also be a selection of work by Edna Lumb.
The Gallery is hosting an artist talk with Lucy Pedlar and Rob Vale on Friday 30 April and will also be holding an artists’ professional development event on Thursday 20 May from 1pm until 4pm.
The gallery events are all free and open to the public but please book a place for the talks by ringing the box office on 0113 283 5998.
Philip McHugh, who is studying for a BA(Hons) Art and Design degree, submitted a ‘bedroom window’ with a month’s diary entries inscribed upon it in colour for the competition. He is interested in the ‘language of line’ and can see it projected across Europe as he travels with his railcard and scroll of plastic to record diversity and typographical variety.
Gemma Sloan, who is a BA(Hons) Graphic Arts and Design student, seeks to explore Bulgaria with a camera, recording the country’s artistic and architectural traditions before mass tourism takes hold. She hopes it may result in a book in her final year.
The featured artists in the Gallery exhibition are:
Pip Dickens
Dickens recognises and celebrates the individual values of painting mediums by exploring new ways of creating illusion – forming jewel like areas that reveal pure colour for what it is – beautiful colour. Influenced by Chinese and Japanese culture, the ‘oriental’ paintings take the highly decorative nature of cultural objects to their extreme with strong use of patterns and colour.
Lucy Irvine
Using plastic tubing, clothesline and cable ties, Irvine has opened up the stayed boundaries between art and craft with her intuitive sculptural process – identifying the cultural connotations of basketry as a vehicle for asserting identity and belonging. Irvine’s work takes its lead from contemporary Australia and America - her artistic practice clearly enriched by travel.
Lucy Pedlar
Taking modifications to the built environment and the effect on our daily lives as her subject, Pedlar examines whether intervention can open up new alternatives, provoking a different way of thinking about space? Behaviour and identity are shaped by environment, but are there are other possibilities? Site specific, the installation will focus on the built environment in and around the gallery.
Rob Vale
What does it mean to be human? How do we make sense of the world around us? Taking inspiration from religion and philosophy, this work represents the basic universal truths that make up the human self. Contemplative, solitary and singular, Vale’s projections examine the links and infinite variables created through these connections - each greater than the sum of its parts.
Edna Lumb
Edna Lumb was a scholarship student at Leeds College of Art from 1948-1953. In the 1960s the College was incorporated into the newly-established Leeds Polytechnic which became Leeds Metropolitan University in 1992, the year in which the artist died. Her bequest which has enabled the establishment of the Edna Lumb Travel Prize was thus the first to be made to the new University.
For her main degree years Edna was a student in the Design School
of the Art College and in her second year won its newly instituted
Travel Prize. Although this was only £50 she managed to stretch
the money over two months, visiting the art collections in Paris
and travelling to the south via Avignon, looking and sketching
as she went and bringing back a considerable body of work. The
whole experience proved a revelation to her personally and had
an incalculable effect upon her work.
The esteem in which she held her years at Leeds Art College and
the value she placed on her own Travelling Scholarship are reflected
in her will. This provides for the endowment of an annual Travel
Prize for students of art (especially painting) at Leeds Met
and she asked that all her unsold work be put into an artistic
trust to perpetuate the award.
