What Will They See of Me?

Lucy Clout, Kate Cooper, Anne Haaning and Marianna Simnett are all showing new works created using £4000 bursaries awarded to them by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Film and Video Umbrella last summer to develop their ideas.

The four were selected from more than 150 submissions, and were tasked with creating work in response to the curatorial brief What Will They See of Me?

The results are works that explore ‘themes of identity, visibility and posterity in ways that both embrace and interrogate new technology and express a strong and compelling performative impulse’, say the award organisers.

Clout’s film looks at how modern communication creates a strange, constant level of background noise, examining the messages in the periphery.

Gender and how we perform it is the central idea of Cooper’s work. She looks at how the images we project of ourselves online are edited and posted to create a digital record of our own bodies.

Haaning, meanwhile, examines the digital records we inadvertently leave of ourselves – or the ‘digital ghosts’ – which will survive when the people that created them are long gone.

Finally, Simnett’s piece uses the strange image of an udder to represent ‘innocence and abundance’, according to the exhibition organisers. From what we can make out, it’s a comment on how images aren’t always as they seem, but are more often than not the product of technological tinkering.

Following the exhibition, two of the four artists will be selected to receive a further £20,000 commission, enabling them to develop these initial ideas into expanded works.  These pieces will then be exhibited once again at Jerwood Space, London, and then CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, in 2015. 

Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards: What Will They See of Me? runs until 27 April at Jerwood Space, 171 Union St, London SE1