Jerwood Painting Fellowships

11 March – 5 April 2014

Anthony Faroux – Susan Sluglett – Sophia Starling

Launched in 2013, the Jerwood Painting Fellowships are part of Jerwood Visual Arts (JVA), a contemporary national touring programme of awards, exhibitions and events. Designed to provide crucial time and support to promising emerging painters in the early stages of their professional practice, the Fellowships offer three artists a bursary coupled with a year-long mentoring relationship. Anthony Faroux, Susan Sluglett and Sophia Starling were selected for the outstanding quality and potential of their work, and partnered by mentors Fabian Peake, Marcus Harvey and Mali Morris RA, respectively. This support is invaluable for emerging artists, particularly within the current financial landscape of the arts.

Shonagh Manson, Director of the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, comments: :The themes arising from this past year are brave ones; of risk, challenging habit and expectation and what has come before. The works they have produced for exhibition have benefited from an intense period of focus, conversation, reflection and making.”

Anthony Faroux’s installations are inspired by the imagination of selective memory and how objects can appear to be the residue of past experiences. To achieve this he creates composites of film, sound and painting that piece together the fragments of an image.

Susan Sluglett exhibits large canvases themed on a royal wedding. Her seemingly frenetic execution is underpinned by slick, tightly controlled compositions, reflecting in paint the same conflicting emotions of the subject matter.

Sophia Starling’s work explores the infinite possibilities for abstract painting in three dimensions. After wrapping long lengths of material around large wooden strains and pleating sections of canvas into circles before adding paint, she begins to partially undo the canvas, revealing a richly coloured contour interrupted by darts of bare canvas.