We Have A Winner!
Last updated: 02/10/2006 - 12:48
Edinburgh’s National Gallery of Modern Art wins Britain's biggest arts prize - the Gulbenkian Prize for ‘Museum of the Year’.
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh has won the second ever Gulbenkian Prize for museum of the year - for its dramatic and radical landscaping project, ‘Landform’. At £100,000 the Gulbenkian Prize is the UK’s richest single arts competition award.
The Gulbenkian judges were captivated by Landform – which provides a new striking front that cannot fail to impress visitors to the gallery. The judges described it as a transforming experience, a magnet that attracts people into the museums and a unique intervention in the museum and gallery landscape.
Landform, a serpentine, stepped mound, with three crescent shaped pools covering three acres, was commissioned by the Gallery in 1999 when it decided to redevelop its front lawn, a former school playing field. It turned to American-born architectural historian Charles Jencks, whose design for Landform reflects the Edinburgh landscape and was inspired by chaos theory and weather systems. The project took two years to build at a cost of £380,000.
Since its completion, it has become one of Edinburgh’s most visited attractions drawing record numbers into the Galleries. “I pictured,” says Charles Jencks, “a contemporary equivalent of Seurat’s La Grande Jatte – everything going on at once, amidst sun, water and city life. You could eat lunch, perhaps have a drink, chase kites...”. The transformation of the grounds has proved to be so popular that one area of turf has recently been replaced because it had been worn out by so many people walking on it.
Landform - based on the concept of chaos theory - is part sculpture, part garden, part land-art, a magical back-drop for everything from exhibition openings to the Gallery's Fun Day for families.
Landform
Richard Calvocoressi, Director of the gallery, said: “We are honoured to have won this most prestigious prize sponsored by the Gulbenkian Foundation. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and its surrounding parkland, have become special places in the UK for appreciating outdoor sculpture, which Charles Jencks’s beautiful Landform has done much to enhance. We are absolutely delighted that the Gallery has been recognised in this way and we intend to use the award to continue with developments in the grounds and to make them an even more stimulating place for our visitors.”
Speaking about his design, Jencks has said: “I am trying to create a new language of landscape. If you look at the way nature organises itself, it has inherent principles of movement. I wanted to design something that reflected these natural forces but heightened them. The shapes have been partly inspired by two so-called ‘strange attractors’, one of them called the Ueda Attractor, named after the Japanese scientist that discovered it. These ‘attractors’ (weather systems, for example) create a series of self-similar curves that overlap but never repeat, and are attracted to a certain point or ‘basin’. I think the landform will create a gateway to the area and identify the gallery from the road as a special place – the locus of contemporary art in Scotland.”
The Gulbenkian Prize celebrates some of the most inspiring and innovative initiatives that have had a genuine and demonstrable effect on the public perception of museums and galleries. It is open to any registered museum, large or small, in the UK; its prize money of £100,000 makes it the largest single arts prize in the country.
The other finalists were:
Reticulum [Latin for 'net'] is a completely new way of a museum engaging local children's interest in the past. Antiquities' staff worked with partner schools in Northumberland, in both the Museum and the classroom, to give children the opportunity to handle artefacts and explore historical themes and ideas. In between school sessions and museum visits, the children use e-mail to consult the Museum's Archaeology staff and to work with other schools in the region. Through grants the Museum even subsidises the children's transport to and from the Museum!
Pembrokeshire Museums Service worked with local Romany Gypsy communities to create travelling exhibition of Romany history and culture. The traditional horse-drawn wooden wagon, a varda in Romani language, became the focus of a mobile exhibition that has travelled to a number of sites around Pembrokeshire and also been on public display in the County Museum at Scolton Manor.
For the past 10 years, Norton Priory Museum Trust has enjoyed a special working partnership with Astmoor Day Services, a day centre run by Halton Borough Council, for adults with a learning disability. Over the past 12 months, this partnership has been lifted to a new level in the Positive Partnerships project, which includes the BBC 2 Hidden Gardens ‘Medieval Herb Garden’ project. The result of this special partnership is that it has helped to change the public's perception of adults with a learning disability for the better.
The thirteen previously short-listed projects (see breakdown below), from which the finalists were selected, ranged from a crowd-pulling national blockbusting exhibition: 'Titian' at London's National Gallery, to a small local history exhibition in a deprived area of Merseyside.
The exhibits and venues listed cover issues as diverse as the very modern day plight of the world’s asylum seekers (Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art) to Romany history and culture - displayed, fittingly enough, in a travelling exhibition in Pembrokeshire.
The shortlist from which these four were drawn (in alphabetical order by city/town) also included:
This exhibition features an emotional robot that learns human expressions as it interacts with visitors and a micro machine, only 1 mm across, that has working parts ten times smaller than the width of a human hair. These are just two of the extraordinary and unique exhibits on show in the Futures Gallery at Thinktank. All the exhibits in the gallery have been designed to both challenge and encourage visitors, to think about what the future might possibly be like.
Sanctuary was an ambitious and thought-provoking project, which aimed to engage the power of contemporary art to explore and address issues relating to human rights and the plight of asylum seekers. Developed in partnership with Amnesty International and the Scottish Refugee Council, Sanctuary featured a major exhibition that explored concerns such as forced migration, displacement, torture, oppression, identity and concepts of 'home'.
Internationally acclaimed artists exhibited alongside asylum seeker and refugee artists resident in Britain. The exhibition was complemented by a 13 month programme of unique community workshops as well as a selling show to support Amnesty International.
Mary Seacole
In October 2003, it was again the only NT venue to hold a series of events to celebrate Black History Month. Its activities included an interactive Black Londoners history mystery trail, storytelling workshops for people aged 55 plus, a vibrant series of school visits and a collaborative performance by local students of the story of Mary Seacole, a Jamaican nurse who tended troops in the Crimean War.
The usual image of modern sculpture is of an artwork in the gallery, whether on or off the plinth. But 'Other Criteria' presents a host of different ways of seeing sculpture, from everyday ephemera to the specialist souvenir. A unique exhibition that throws light on the practice of sculpture in Britain over the last 100 years, it uses a broad selection of material to reconsider the conventional category of 20th century British sculpture, and to propose other ways of telling the story.
Children At Arms
The Knight is Young exhibition presents a fascinating collection of weapons and armour made for children from the 15th to the end of the 19th centuries, and is intended to stimulate people to think about the nature of childhood throughout different periods of history. The concept of 'play' is one that fascinates both adults and children alike.
The National Gallery's Titian exhibition was one of the highlights of 2003. Over forty works by the artist were assembled - following negotiations that took five years to conclude - to be shown alongside the National Gallery's own magnificent collection of eleven paintings. Alongside the exhibition were education projects, multi-media presentations, a Titian website and 'Titian After Dark' - a series of late night openings with films, music and talks every Thursday. The result: some of the highest number of visitors for an exhibition at the National Gallery.
The aim of the Creating History project is to bring history to life, through collections, oral reminiscence, drama and video. The main school involved is located in a deprived area, situated near to the BICC factory site, once the main employer in the town. The factory has a long and fascinating history and many ex workers still live in Prescot today.
The topic inspired the children to explore and interpret local history, bringing in national curriculum themes, and also giving then a real sense of their own heritage and citizenship.
CommunityThrough its focus on the learning needs of local people, Clifton Park Museum used innovative and motivating ways of attracting those with basic skills through heritage activities. This is the first museum project to be funded by the Basic Skills Agency. Museum workshops were held for adults on a variety of subjects, encouraging them to practice basic skills and take up an interest in local history, whilst improving their literacy and numeracy.
Tyne & Wear Museums collaborated with North Tyneside Arts and Nexus, the body that runs the Tyne & Wear Metro system, who had jointly commissioned artist Michael Pinsky to create a permanent contemporary art project linking Wallsend Metro Station with nearby Segedunum, the Roman fort at the eastern end of Hadrian's Wall.
This witty and engaging project included installations at the Metro station, Latin and English signs (Noli Fumare - No Smoking); even the local job centre was re-named Forum Venalicium (slave market)!
The first winner of the Gulbenkian Prize for museum of the year was The National Centre for Citizenship and the Law housed in the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham.
The Gulbenkian Prize for Museum of the Year is administered by The Museum Prize, a charitable company created in 2001 by representatives of National Heritage, the Museums Association, the National Art Collections Fund and the Campaign for Museums. These organisations collectively agreed to put aside award schemes they formerly ran (including the 'National Heritage Museum of the Year' award) and lend their support to this one central prize.
The Gulbenkian MuseumThe Foundation's founder, Calouste Gulbenkian, was one of the most distinguished private collectors in the world. The Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon is well-known and loaned several major pieces of Lalique jewellery to the Victoria & Albert Museum’s highly acclaimed Art Nouveau exhibition in 2000 and simultaneously mounted a major exhibition of its treasures at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The winner of the inaugural Gulbenkian Prize in 2003 was The National Centre for Citizenship and the Law housed in the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham.
Loyd Grossman, Chairman of the Gulbenkian judges, who made the winning announcement at a ceremony at the Royal Academy at Burlington Gardens, commented on the selectors’ final choice of Edinburgh’s Modern Art Gallery. He said: “Landform is an inspirational, beautiful project which will completely transform the experience visitors have at an already outstanding gallery. Landform has the potential to actually change people's ideas about what a museum does and can do.”
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art receives a cheque for £100,000 and an enamelled silver bowl designed by award-winning metalwork artist, Vladimir Böhm.
Charles Jencks was born in Baltimore in 1939 and now designs landscape, sculpture and writes on cosmogenic art. In addition to Landform, recent commissions include 'DNA' sculptures for James Watson at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, Long Island, the Matt Ridley, Centre for Life, Newcastle upon Tyne and DNA sculpture for the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. His links with Scotland are extensive – his home, Portrack House in Dumfriesshire, backs onto one of the most spectacular gardens anywhere in the world – the garden of 'Cosmic Speculation', which he devised with his wife, Maggie Keswick.
Charles Jencks is currently designing a landform sculpture for in front of a new Maggie's Centre (of which he is a Trustee) which is due to open at Raigmore Hospital, Inverness.
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