Meet the Winners of the Graduate Art Show Prize 2024
Joanna Cohn
MA Print, Royal College of Art
All that I am, Wheat seeds and roots, coconut coir
This is a sculpture, a self portrait of my head, made entirely from wheat. I think of it as a 3D monoprint as each version has variation, like many other forms of print. When it is dried, the roots and seeds are lightweight and stable. I grew the wheat seeds without the use of soil, in the form of my likeness to represent my belief that as human beings we are a part of the world, and are not separate from it. This is a belief I learned from my native American family who live in New Mexico. Despite my family being disbursed thought the world and fragmented through adoption, and now incorporating many nationalities and races, I carry a sense of belonging not to one place or people, but belonging to the earth. It informs my relationship to the world, as well as how and why I make art.
Emilia Ashby
BA Photography, University of the West of England
Child of the Novacene, A3 Framed Photograph
This body of work explores a future dystopia in which Artificial intelligence has become the dominant species on Earth. It imagines what the relationship humans could have with Artificial Intelligence and more specifically, what it would look like if people saw the AI as a higher power and chose to worship it, forming a new religion. For this project, I have used self portraiture in an abstract natural landscape, physically devoting myself to this higher power. This landscape is familiar yet unfamiliar leaving it up to the audience to decide when this shift in power on earth could happen and how that affects the world surrounding the subject of the image. This series explores the relationship between an individual and this higher power in a world where reality has become uncertain.