Creative Wales Awards 2011/12

22nd March 2012

Earlyer today (22 March 2012), 22 professional artists from across the arts received a Creative Wales Award from Arts Council of Wales at a reception held at Galeri, Caernarfon.

Supported by Arts Council of Wales and Lottery funding, Creative Wales Awards of up to £25,000 are available for Welsh artists every year. For 2011/12, 22 artists have been awarded a total of £400,000. Recognising the role of artists, the Arts Council has increased the availability of funding for these highly competitive awards by £50,000 this year.  The awards enable artists to take time to experiment, innovate, and take forward their work. The awards aim to develop excellence by offering a period of research and development to some of Wales’ most interesting artists. 

David Alston, Arts Director, Arts Council of Wales chairs the panel of Arts Council and Literature Wales officers, National Advisers and who adjudicate the Creative Wales Awards. David commented on the exceptional high standard amongst this year's recipients:

“The panel had an onerous but extremely enjoyable task. Wales has many artists who are pushing the boundaries. That is essentially what a Creative Wales award can make possible – an exploratory space for an individual from which the arts as a whole will benefit.”

The recipients of the Creative Wales Awards 20011/12 are:

CREATIVE WALES MAJOR AWARDS:

Dance: Jo Shapland, Simon Whitehead
Drama: Steve Davis
Literature: John Williams
Music: Lynne Plowman, Neil Yates
Visual Arts: Simon Fenoulhet, Miranda Whall, Craig Wood

CREATIVE WALES AWARDS (up to £12,000):

Applied Art & Crafts: Becky Adams, Duncan Ayscough, Ainsley Hillard, Jessica Lloyd-Jones, Tilla Waters
Dance: Sandra Harnisch-Lacey
Drama: Jain Boon
Music: John Rea

Visual Arts: Paul Emmanuel, Helen Griffin, Mark Gubb

The Creative Wales Ambassadors Awards are made by nomination and recognise significant individual achievement in the arts along with the aim to raise the profile of Welsh culture outside of Wales. This year Arts Council of Wales is delighted to award 2 awards to Claire Curneen and Pamela Rawnsley. Claire’s award will give her the opportunity to explore the rich collection of the National Museum of Ireland where she will work closely with the museum to understand certain objects and reflect this in a new body of work.  Pamela’s award will enable her to research and produce a new body of work in various ways and discover her visual response to a completely different environment - South Australia.

Professor Dai Smith, Chair, Arts Council of Wales, congratulated this year's successful Creative Wales artists:

“We are pleased to have been able to augment these awards in difficult times.The Creative Wales Awards are one of the high points of the arts calendar in Wales. Arts Council of Wales believes in risk taking and nothing is more exciting than to invest in the creativity of those individuals who make the art that delights and challenges us as a dynamic society.  The return on this investment by Arts Council of Wales is manifold.  We will continue to make the space and time available for the development of these dazzling talents. ”

Before the awards were given this afternoon there were a series of discussions evaluating the Creative Wales Awards. Previous recipients of the Award described how their practice and careers had been influenced by the award. This led into wider discussion about arts practice and the role an award such as Creative Wales plays in the careers of artists. David Alston is seen in the photograph above introducing the day's discussions.

Over the next few days video recordings of the discussions will appear on Culture Colony on the Creative Wales Awards Platform.

1. by Pitch on March 23rd, 2012

   Really Mr Alston! I'm not sure that 'onerous' is quite the right word!
   on·er·ous/ˈōnərəs/
   Adjective:
   (of a task, duty, or responsibility) Involving a burdensome amount of effort and difficulty.
   Involving heavy obligations.
   Synonyms:
   burdensome - heavy - weighty - difficult - laborious
   
   Also, who was invited to the evaluation discussion??? As both a previous major creative wales award recipient, and an ACW national advisor i thought i might have had some notice that this was happening!

2. by Pitch on March 23rd, 2012

   Sori, that previous post came from Richard Huw Morgan, not from Pitch (I'm signed in through that part of my split personality at the moment) but it actually reinforces the question as my collaborator on Pitch, John Rowley, has also been the recipient of a Creative Wales Award.....Had we known anything about this we could have flagged up the awards on Pitch this week. We are always keen to point out on the programme guests who have received the awards, its not as though Wales is awash with media outlets where such significant investment in the careers of individual artists can be celebrated!