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Edna Lumb Travel Prize
28/04/05
The winners of the 11th Edna Lumb Travel Prize are Leeds Met fine arts students Helen Cunningham and Theodore Reeves-Evison, and art and design student Leontia Reilly. The award, totalling £2,000, is presented to Leeds Met art students each year to enable them to carry out travel study and broaden their horizons.
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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 presentation to this year’s winners included talks from last year’s winners, Gemma Sloan and Phillip McHugh, about their travelling experiences.
Phillip bought a van with his money and travelled through Europe completing works of art which involve painting onto large sheets of glass. Gemma, who used the prize money to fund a trip to Bulgaria, said: “I want to thank the Edna Lumb Trust for allowing me to have such an amazing experience.”
This year’s winners have chosen Venice, Japan and Italy as their destinations. For further information about the prize winners please click here.
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.
