Christ’s College Art Prize 2024 - Our Earth

Due to a generous donation by Professor Martin Johnson, Christ's is delighted to announce that the theme of this year’s competition is ‘Our Earth’.

2023 was the hottest year on record, globally. Climate change is a clear and urgent crisis, affecting communities and ecosystems around the world, though its impacts are not distributed equally. Our earth also faces other, related environmental issues, such as pollution, deforestation, and the endangerment of wildlife.

How do we respond? Which people and communities do ideas of our earth or of greening address, include, prioritize? What can the arts offer? This year’s competition asks us to reflect on our earth, to think about how we share and belong to it, and to imagine what it means to care for and ‘green’ the ecosystems in which we live.

The committee invites entrants to consider a response to particular features of the College Site. For example, artworks might relate to one or more of the following: the clocktower, the lawn in First Court, the water in the Malcolm Bowie Bathing Pool, the Fellows’ Garden, Milton’s Mulberry Tree, etc.

The competition is open to all current members of the College (staff, students and Fellows). Entries can take any form (from portrait and group portrait through narrative panels, sculpture, film and abstract work) and any medium, and should be accompanied by a brief explanation of how they address the theme and where in College (e.g. the Hall, Upper Hall, Buttery, Library Corridor and so on) they might practically be exhibited. 

The deadline for submission of entries will be 6pm on Friday 26 April 2024.

To enter the competition, please email a high resolution photograph of your work, its medium, dimensions, title, and rationale of fit in terms of theme and possible display to Professor Carrie Vout (cv103@cam.ac.uk) by this date.

Short-listed entries must then be delivered to the Visual Arts Committee c/o Sharon Knight in O1 of First Court by 12.00 noon on Tuesday 7 May 2024, with the winner and a runner up being notified before the end of Easter full term.

A prize of £350 will be awarded to the winner, and £100 to the runner-up. The judging panel will consist of the members of the College’s Visual Arts Committee.

 

Rehanging the College Pictures

How does one ensure that any collection of pictures remains relevant to successive viewers? How does one ensure that it makes people look and see, and generates ongoing discussion?

Now in Hall, the bust of Milton, and Darwin in bright red in the stained glass window, engage not with their Doppelgängers, but with Francis Darwin (Botany), Quentin Skinner (Intellectual History), Alfred Cort Haddon (Anthropology) (https://alumni.christs.cam.ac.uk/alfred-cort-haddon), and Alan Munro (Immunology), among others. Works by women as well as men are highlighted. ‘I have never seen that picture of Quentin Skinner before’, said one Fellow. It had been hanging in the Fellows’ Parlour for over a year. Rehanging renews our curiosity.

A pared-down hang of greater stylistic diversity and colour brings Hall into the twenty-first century and creates an environment that will seamlessly accommodate the portrait of the current Master, Professor Jane Stapleton, when it is finished. New picture lights bathe the oils in light, creating jewel-like features on a more accented wooden paneling.

In the Mountbatten Room, Charles Darwin, Jan Smuts, Lord Mountbatten and ‘Milton’ show a more informal side to their characters, engaging in conversation with each other and with photographs of the Fellowship taken by Judith Aronson some forty years ago. In the Lloyd Room, the canvases of Finch and Baines stare across at each other with renewed vigour.

Rehanging the pictures has also allowed the College to lend to Kettle’s Yard (https://www.cam.ac.uk/artistunknown), paintings conservator, Polly Saltmarsh, to restore broken frames, and Christine Kimbriel from the University’s Hamilton Kerr Institute to do cutting-edge research. Watch this space for exciting news about one of our most precious portraits of Lady Margaret.