Outside In: National award winners announced
Pallant House Gallery has announced the winners of the 2012 Outside In: National awards. The announcement was made at a ceremony at the gallery in Chichester on Thursday 25 October.
Over 2,300 entries from across the UK were submitted for the opportunity to display their work in Pallant House Gallery. Eighty entries were chosen to be exhibited in the main exhibition space of the Gallery and six were awarded solo exhibition spaces in 2013 and 2014. The Outside In: National awards winners are: Michelle Roberts, Kate Bradbury, Matthew Sergison-Main, Nigel Kingsbury, Phil Baird and Manuel Lanca Bonifacio.
Outside In, set up by Pallant House Gallery in 2006, is a triennial competition that provides opportunities for artists marginalised due to health, disability or other circumstances who have a desire to create, and who see themselves as facing a barrier to the art world. The aim is to create a fairer art world which rejects traditional value and institutional judgements about whose work can and should be displayed.
Marc Steene, Deputy Director at Pallant House Gallery, who spearheaded the project, said:
“The challenge we are embracing is to reconsider how we define who is and is not an artist and what is and is not art in order to change attitudes in the mainstream art world.”
Commenting in the Outside In: National shortlist publication, he writes: “The artists in this year’s Outside In: National are the lucky few to see the chink of light that the competition offers into the upper echelons of the art world. Their works hangs alongside the masterpieces of the collections at the Gallery, without embarrassment, without apology, proving that art and creativity can be found in the most unlikely places and be seen to enrich, add value and debate, making Pallant House Gallery and the art world a more equal and democratising place.”
The PHF Arts programme awarded Pallant House Gallery a grant of £138,500 over three years in 2010, following from a previous grant of £48,766 in 2008 for the development and expansion of this project.