Phoenix Art Space is delighted to be taking part in the Platform Graduate Award for the fifth year in a row.

Led by CVAN South East and launched in 2012, the Platform Graduate Award is a unique initiative celebrating emerging artistic talent in the South East and South West regions. Designed to provide crucial support to graduate artists at a pivotal stage in their careers, the award offers opportunities for exhibitions and professional development. In recognition of the ongoing challenges faced by artists in establishing their artistic practice post-university, this year’s award will provide selected artists from each participating higher education partner with a £500 bursary and six months of mentoring support. Exhibitions will be happening across six regional galleries including Phoenix Art Space, Aspex Portsmouth, Modern Art Oxford and MIRROR Arts University Plymouth.

Congratulations to our selected 2024 graduates; Alice Triff, Christopher Brown, Ella Benson, Ellie Davies, Kitty Reeves-Short, Leon French, Megan Batten and Peggy Sykes. Nominees were selected by a panel consisting of Executive Director of Phoenix Art Space Lucy Day, Noelle Collins, (Exhibitions & Offsite Curator, Towner Eastbourne) and John Marchant, (John Marchant Gallery).

The next phase of Platform will see the partner organisations each shortlist a finalist, each of whom receive a £500 bursary and mentoring support. Find out more about the Award

Visit the Platform Graduate Award 2024 exhibition in the Project Space from 31 August – 22 September. Join us for the exhibition opening on Friday 30 August, 6pm – 8pm.

 

SELECTED GRADUATES

 

Alice Triff
University of Brighton, BA Photography
Alice’s recent projects have been driven by an interest in the politics of the British landscape. Her interest originates from growing up in a conservative village in Oxfordshire. Her work critiques contemporary culture, which insists on prescribing us a version of how to behave in rural spaces. There is often an element of performance, relating to the themes in the work, such as trespass.

Christopher Brown
East Sussex College Hastings, BA Fine Art Practice
Underpinning Chris’s practice is the mechanics of perception and humanity’s desire for coherence. His paintings regularly resemble landscapes that blur lines between abstraction and figuration, finding existence mid-mutation. Using diverse visual references, architectural forms distort and wrestle with organic shapes, which nod to nature’s power to create and destroy. Brown’s sculptural assemblages mimic his painting’s language but appear more like mutated organisms.

Ella Benson
University of Brighton, BA Fine Art
Influenced by folk and feminist art, Ella’s work explores themes of womanhood, female relationships, and mother nature, deepening her connection to her heritage and fostering a new sense of self-worth and identity. Primarily working with fabric, wood and embroidery, surface forms a significant role in her art whilst simultaneously forming an ode to the pioneering women in the field.

Ellie Davies
University of Brighton, BA Fine Art Painting
Ellie is an oil painter whose work focuses on the relationship contemporary audiences have with folklore tradition and superstitions. This results in narrative driven scenes with an abundance of personal iconography. Blending the folk tales of her childhood with the chronicles of her own life, these stories are always situated in natural landscapes, reminiscent of her upbringing surrounded by the mountains, lakes and forests of the Lake District.

Kitty Reeves-Short
University of Brighton, BA Graphic Design
Kitty’s practice centers around analogue, hand-rendered processes and materiality, with a strong emphasis on archival materials, photo manipulation, and printed matter. Kitty is intrigued by storytelling; she finds inspiration in untold stories, breathing life into subjects that would otherwise go forgotten.

Leon French
University of Brighton, BA Graphic Design
Leon’s practice continually explores the intersections of art, design, and academia. He is passionate about transforming experiences or research into data and distilling this information into simple narratives. Through this process, he aims to highlight the endless possibilities of imagining a place, theory, or lived experience from entirely new perspectives.

Megan Batten
University of Brighton, BA Graphic Design
Primarily rooted in demonstrating the visualisation of ecological theory, Megan aims to reignite the consideration of audience, to Earth, within her work. Seeking to develop how reflection manifests through the physicality of object, tactility has become a recognisable through-line displayed in her creative practice, which is consequently explored through experimental methods of analogue working.

Peggy Sykes
University of Brighton, BA Fine Art
Peggy is a multidisciplinary artist, with a key focus on moving image and performance, her work normally centres around female and queer narratives. Sykes discusses friendship, connections and relationships regarding people and places.