Fine Art student wins prestigious competition

A York St John University Fine Art student has won a prestigious competition with a €600 prize.

The Eleanor Worthington Prize has been won by Harriet Sutcliffe for her video piece Degeneration.

Harriet’s work, alongside a retrospective of works from the last six years of the competition, will make up the Eleanor Worthington exhibition, hosted by The New School House Gallery on Peasholme Green which runs from 4 until 12 June.

The Fine Art student said: “It is incredibly exciting to be part of a professional exhibition, separate from academic requirements. The exhibition has only been made possible by the Eleanor Worthington Prize to which I am eternally thankful for.”

Eleanor Worthington, who was born in York in 1982, and spent five years studying art and art history at the Istituto Statale d’Arte (now Liceo Artistico Scuola del Libro) in Urbino. She died in Italy in 2008. She had a severe form of epilepsy and spent the last five years of her life confined to a wheelchair, only able to express herself using her eyes and face.

In 2009, Eleanor’s family and friends established the Eleanor Worthington Prize, in collaboration with Liceo Artistico Scuola del Libro and the Urbino Local Authority. The aim of the prize was to transform Eleanor’s individual story into a collective experience and raise public consciousness of the many and varied issues surrounding disability.

This year, for the first time, the prize was opened up to undergraduates in the UK and had the theme ‘Overcoming Barriers: Beyond Disability.’

Applicants included students from the University of Sunderland, University of Brighton, Glasgow School of Art and Liverpool John Moore University as well as York St John.

Harriet, who is 21 and just completed the second year of her course, said the purpose of Degeneration was to put the viewer in an unfamiliar situation to make them question the effects of disability on people’s lives.

The video features an elderly woman, Harriet’s grandmother, who has the sight disability Macular Degeneration. It shows manipulated images, as if the viewer is seeing them through her eyes. Harriet hopes the video will increase people’s empathy to these sorts of conditions.

She said: “The concept of invisible disabilities inspired me as the world is such a busy place and continually there is little patience given to those who need a little more support. Personally, I find the lack of interest is unjustified; those with disabilities are no lesser, if anything often stronger for the responsibility they have to endure.

“It is an absolute honour to have won the prize and it makes me proud for my Grandma too. During the making of the video she never really thought about the disability in great depth, just adapted and accepted it. The interest the audiences have expressed so far shows that the ability to empathise has not been lost and people are willing to raise their awareness of such conditions.”

Judges, who included a psychopedagogist from Urbino, an art gallery director from York and Eleanor’s brother, assessed the submissions on relevance to the theme, communicative effectiveness, originality and overall impression.

Giuliana Parodi, who runs the prize said: “Harriet’s work was particularly appreciated on several grounds. Degeneration succeeds admirably in immersing the viewer into the twilight experiences of our subject, challenging complacency.

“At the start of Harriet’s work we are allowed to regard the old woman’s room and her condition as imprisoning. Well before the end of this piece of work Harriet has counter-poised that impression, with a sense of optimism which characterises the old woman’s ability to live in the now.”.