By Shefali Wardell (Alumni, MA Drawing, Wimbledon College of Arts)
When you’re at college, particularly studying at some of the critically vigorous centres that make up part of UAL, you get used to being immersed in other people’s work, and in some ways maybe we started the Refresh Art Award to get that experience of seeing so much unknown brilliant work again. In just two weeks, we’ve already had some gorgeous entries and seeing the new work has been the most exciting part of running the award.
Applying to art shows and competitions, awards, prizes and residencies seems to be a right of passage after art school. Yet it isn’t a direct route to success, whatever each person defines that as. It doesn’t take long before you wonder about the merit of spending hours (in some cases days), and often large sums of money applying for things that are really hard for the majority of applicants to benefit from.
Although we both have different personal and professional reasons for getting involved in this project, I think one of the things we had in common was wondering whether another pricey application was really going to be worth it, or even affordable. Then there’s the stress when you finally do get your work chosen for something, that on top of entry fees, admin fees and sometimes hanging fees, you then need to pay to have it professionally framed. This sometimes costs more than the work itself.
So we started wondering what we would want from an art award, as artists. The first obvious thing is that not everybody can win the main prize, or even be selected for a show. So we decided to try and build value in to the setup for other applicants.
This is why we are promoting everybody’s work who enters across our social media accounts, our website and further. So at the very least, someone who applies and doesn’t get in to the show still gets recognised as a contemporary artist, and hopefully gets their work seen.
Everyone will also be able to sell pieces through our online platform throughout the duration of the show. This is why we’re urging people not to leave their application to the last minute because the sooner you apply, the more months of promo you’ll get!
The next step was to look at financial inclusivity. This is so important today when considering living costs throughout education, extended unpaid internships and the current lack of well-paid graduate jobs in the UK. So we set the entry price to start at £10, which we hope is a reasonable amount to spend on the chance of a show and a big prize, with some guaranteed promotion.
If people want to submit more work they can pay a little more, but it was important to us that our entry fee would be achievable for as many people as possible. We’re also not insisting on framing for the show, knowing first-hand how the prospect of spending a lot of money without any guarantee of a sale puts us off exhibiting at all, and also causes stress.
Our other main drive was to have a truly 21st Century art show. Fruit, flowers, the old vicarage door and photo-realistic oil paintings are still most definitely an important part of life but these aren’t the only reflection of today despite being easy to find in galleries, art awards etc. Collectors and commercial galleries also deal in what sells, and you couldn’t ask them to do otherwise. Yet this also means that many artists working on less fashionable subject matter, or in a different style get neglected.
So in that way the Refresh Art Award is our attempt to take a snapshot of what’s really going on in art at the moment. Digital technology has allowed us to start establishing an Internet presence, something already rooted in collaboration and dissemination. Through this, we’ve been able to see such a wide range of work that doesn’t usually get promoted by bigger organisations, and we’re also able to run an international call-out. As an art award, we’re a tiny and completely independent body, so we’re urging people who like what they see to follow our accounts and spread the word.
Lastly we met on the MA Drawing course at Wimbledon, where drawing was not seen as only the preserve of the fine artist. We think it’s about time that illustration, graphic art, digital art and more is shown in the same place as something containing linseed oil and charcoal… because after all this is the 21st Century.