ANNOUNCEMENT
EMERGING VISUAL ARTIST AWARD 2015
An Arts Council of Ireland, Wexford Arts Centre & Wexford County Council
Partnership Initiative

Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford County Council and the Arts Council are pleased to announce Dublin-based artist Jonathan Mayhew as the recipient of the ninth annual Emerging Visual Artist Award.  As a joint initiative between the three organisations, the award’s aim is to recognise and support the development of promising and committed visual artists in Ireland. The winner receives €5,000 to supplement and assist in the production of new work for a solo exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre. As the recipient of the award, Mayhew will create a new body of work throughout the period of January - December 2016, to be exhibited in January 2017. 

Mayhew is a visual artist based in Dublin interested in the use of negation, abstraction and appropriation as strategies to create his work. He destabilises the intended functions of images, objects, words and ideas, allowing alternative and unique ways of investigating and handling them. Looking at how culture and the world around us is continually being repeated and reworked in a constant cycle of renewal, his practice has been heavily influenced by writers such as Kathy Acker, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Georges Perec and Marguerite Duras along with experimental literature and poetry. Mayhew's working process is heavily based in the exploration of ideas, research, reading and the gathering of materials to work with or be assembled. The production of the subsequent work is then achieved relatively quickly. His practice makes use of a variety of media from vinyl text to video, sound, painting, print and sculpture; whatever medium best reflects his ideas as simply as possible. This is more important to his process than a style or signature.

Due to his ongoing interest in literature, Mayhew is currently developing ideas of what an expanded text could be; one that takes over a space, falls into a room and becomes more like an object or a breath or the sounds that delivered it, captured in a new form. He describes how words once written always seem too late; they have to wait until they are read to become activated. In preparation for his exhibition in the Wexford Arts Centre, he is in the process of developing new text based works while also exploring how the future has succumbed to retrospection and repetition of the past; a past which is constantly being reworked or retold. He will develop new works around the ideas of how we are trapped in the endless ‘just now’, our ‘lost futures’, along with other works considering our complex relationships with technology. We seem to be on the edge of something new, forever.
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Mayhew received a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art Painting from the National College of Art and Design in 2005, later achieving an M.F.A in Fine Art Painting from the National College of Art and Design 2007. In recent years he has exhibited extensively throughout Ireland, and has also exhibited in England, America and Norway. 

For further information on the artist or the Emerging Visual Art Award please contact Catherine Bowe, Visual Arts Manager, Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Wexford on +353 (0)53 9123764 or email catherine@wexfordartscentre.ie. or Philip Knight, Staff Officer, The Arts Department, Wexford County Council, Carricklawn, Wexford on +353 (0)53 9196500 or email philip.knight@wexfordcoco.ie.
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