Jerwood/FVU awards £20,000 to moving image artists Patrick Hough and Lawrence Lek

The Jerwood/FVU (Film and Video Umbrella) awards have selected artists Patrick Hough and Laurence Lek as this year’s winners. Each will receive £20,000 to develop new moving image pieces for an exhibition at Jerwood Space in spring 2017.

Under the theme Neither One Thing or Another Patrick and Laurence submitted proposals examining the blurry line between real and artificial, physical and virtual.

Patrick’s work uses props and décor from the Hollywood Dream Factory, which stocks artefacts from abandoned film sets, to explore how replicas and fakes can acquire a strange kind of authenticity. Born in 1989, the Irish artist also recently won a research and development grant from Arts Council England.

In Laurence’s piece, an emerging artificial intelligence in the form of a computer-generated ghost in a machine discovers its own autonomy, and tests its creative powers. Lawrence was designer-in-residence at the Design Museum in 2012 and won the Dazed Emerging Artist award last year.

The artists were selected from over 240 applications by a panel including FVU Director Steven Bode, artist and Turner Prize 2014 winner Duncan Campbell, Cliff Lauson, Curator at the Hayward Gallery, Amy Sherlock, Reviews Editor at Frieze, and Jerwood Visual Arts head of programme Sarah Williams. FVU commissions, curates, produces and presents artists’ moving image works that are staged in collaboration with galleries and other cultural partners.