Magnificent Desolation. Digital Print on Tracing Paper. 2019 © Liberty Quinn
ACS has partnered with more institutions than ever over the past year, awarding prizes, bursaries and residencies worth a record £33,750 to students throughout the UK.
We caught up with Liberty, ahead of her first UK solo show, to see how her practice has developed since winning the award.
Q. How would you define your work in three words?
Full of light.
Q. What does winning the ACS x Brighton Breakthrough Award in Printmaking mean for you as an artist?
Winning the ACS x Brighton Breakthrough Award has given me a great confidence in my practice. I have gained a great deal of knowledge and practical skills whilst at the University of Brighton and winning this award reflects my efforts to succeed on a course that I love. As an artist, this gives me the encouragement to know that I am heading in the right direction and makes me excited for the future.
As an artist this really enables me to concentrate on making, rather than the need to work to earn money taking my focus from what I really want to achieve. This prize will allow me to put even more effort into my practice and focus fully on my final, and most important year of study.
The cost of materials can add up as a printmaker, so this prize money will ease the strain of limiting myself on cost and enable me to fully focus on making. My ideas and pieces can now be more ambitious and the prize money will undoubtedly help me achieve a substantial exhibition piece for my degree show in June 2019.
Untitled, Cyanotype on Tracing Paper, 2018 © Liberty Quinn
Q. What medium do you mainly work with and why?
Within my practice, I predominantly work with cyanotype, digital print and time-based media; these processes allow me to transform and push the limits of image, material and surface through scanning, folding and projecting to create visually complex images.
Q. Where do you find most inspiration for your work?
I have an endless fascination with light and shadow. I often link my work to the contemporary sublime, and the works of Mariele Neudecker. Often reading around these ideas, I play with perception and form, which inspires my imagination and sensibility.
Q. Take us through your working process.
I continually push quite simplistic photographic imagery through different reproductive processes to manipulate them – through folding and digitally altering the surface I like to slow down and question the reading of the image. Combining two and three dimensional elements within the same space starts to question the image and object relationship and creates a conversation between the two.
More recently viewing the work on a screen as well as physically printed allows me to create an awareness into the way screen space is almost in proportion to physical space – the digital screen taking up most of daily life and bringing viewing back into the physical to make the viewer question the materiality of the digital and analogue photographic image.
Impalpable Flux, Digital Print, Metal, 2019 © Liberty Quinn
Q. Can you remember the first work of art that you created? What was it and why was it so memorable?
There’s a cut out face of a reindeer printed with potato shapes and my hands printed as antlers that my mum gets out every year at Christmas and puts on the same door in the house, maybe it’s a sign I was always meant to be a printmaker from the age of three!