Q. How would you define your work in three words?

Bold, challenging, engaging.

Q. What does winning the ACS/Loughborough Materials Prize mean for you as an artist?

The financial support that comes with winning the ACS/Loughborough Materials prize will greatly help me realise the work that I want to create for my degree show in June 2018. However, the award is just not about the financial support that it gives to me.

The award validates the works that I have been creating over the past three years. This gives me added confidence and impetus to progress, develop and challenge myself further to produce more ambitious and original works of art.

Q. How do you intend to use the prize money? How will that help you as an artist?

For my final year I intend to develop my installation work by creating a large architectural superstructure consisting of 8-10 rooms with connecting corridor/ lobbies that express themes of freedom, captivity, dehumanisation, evil within our society today.

Crucially, it is the construction of the installation’s superstructure that will prove fundamental in creating the framework within which to realise my concepts and ideas. Without funding support I would not be able accumulate enough money to give full expression to my concepts and ideas that I have been working towards since the start of my university career.

My third year work will be a major stepping stone in the achievement of my ambition to become a practising artist which all would not be achievable without the help and funding from the Artists’ Collecting Society.

Q. What medium do you mainly work with and why?

My preferred medium is installation. Working with this medium gives me the ability to create a complete environment which engages all the audiences’ senses and from which there is no distraction or escape.

I feel that recently more traditional mediums in art have become, in the eyes of the general public, more of a commodity, and therefore passive. In my work I attempt to cause a reaction in the audience by transporting them out of their comfort zones and into the infinite world of installation which communicates and embeds my concepts and themes into their conscious/sub-conscious minds.

The creation of an installation also allows me to fully exploit the opportunity offered by it through the use other media within it; for example, by including film, sculpture and particularly live performance to support the communication of my message.

Q. Where do you find most inspiration for your work?

My passion for engaging in contemporary debate in trying to understand why we as humans do what we do in this world. A key theme within most of my work is my attempt to link past events, mistakes, theories into the contemporary world of today and trying to understand how they might repeat, ripple, resonate into the present.

Once I am able to make these links and understand the important questions that I believe need to be addressed within our society I am inspired to develop these themes in the art work itself. For me, these links, expressed within my art work, are the most important motifs within my work. These are represented in my work by physical symbols which communicate the message of my work. These symbols can also come from my research into literature, poems, even movies which I feel I can utilise within my own work and adapt to suit it.

Gender Captivity
© Jordan Page

Q. Take us through your working process.

My working process can often be very changeable depending on the work I create. I rarely use a sketchbook as a means to experiment and develop my themes because I find them too restrictive. The visual image of the work always begins within my own head as a complete piece which I then create physically once I have planned the structure and made the work that goes within.

When physically creating the work, I always like to begin by building a structure which the work will go into. Then I can begin to visualise and adapt the work within the framework of the structure.

Wherever possible, I use sound, light, smell, surface (touch) in order to completely overwhelm/intoxicate the audience so as to plant the works theme into their minds. Importantly, nothing is admitted into the work that does not contribute to the particular theme(s) that the work is concerned with.

Q. Can you remember the first work of art that you created? What was it and why was it so memorable?

The first piece of art that truly represented me was when I discovered the infinite opportunities for expression using different media. This helped me find my artistic identity. During my final year of GCSE I felt that I was never going to become an artist because I felt I wasn’t talented enough in the traditional skills of drawing or painting. However, my teacher opened my eyes into the potential I had by encouraging my engagement in other media which suited the expression of my concepts better.

From there I created a piece where I pierced and punctured a canvas with barbed wire and hung a gas mask to the tangled wire in order to convey the futility of warfare and the soldiers who died before their time in the front in the two World Wars. This involved working with a variety of materials to create a piece that was both compelling and disturbing.