This year’s Astaire Prize has been won by 4th year BA (Hons) Painting student Jillian Lee Adamson, for her intricate web-like artworks, created with fine embroidery thread.
The prize was established by University of Edinburgh graduate Mark Astaire to recognise outstanding undergraduate work by students at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA). First prize comes with an award of £3,500.
Three runners up each receive £750:
- Esther Castle – 4th year, BA (Hons) Painting
- Anna Avery – 4th year, BA (Hons) Painting
- Jackie Gibb – 3rd year, BA (Hons) Sculpture
Mark said: “It’s the 11th year of the prize and I never fail to be excited by the talent of the students at the Edinburgh College of Art. This year the entries for the prize were outstanding. Choosing the winners was quite a challenge.”
Jillian Lee Adamson creates elaborate woven webs made using single threads of 6-stranded embroidery floss, a 22.5mm sewing needle, water-soluble fabric and beeswax. The works resemble fantastical cellular structures, which are stretched across 125mm sewing needles that have been tapped into a wall. Stretching them in this manner creates a sense of tension, both literal and symbolic. She submitted the piece …filling a February sized hole for the prize.
She says: “Evoking themes of trauma and recovery, my aim with this work is to translate the emotions and struggles that I have experienced whilst navigating a world that is not always designed with my success in mind – and the importance of perseverance and resilience in the face of adversity – through the rhythmic and tactile practice of slow stitching.
“A single thread is weak, but when that thread is woven around itself; when it is tied and pulled, knotted and twisted, it becomes nearly indestructible whilst maintaining an appearance of fragility.”
Esther Castle’s practice is a reflection on her experience of childhood illness and a process of creating curious worlds where peculiar things can grow. Her work Strange Oxygen explores the oppressive barriers non-normative bodies face and is inspired by the way cancer cells were described to me as unexplained, curious growths that took control.
Anna Avery’s practice centres on drawing with stitch to produce ambiguous compositions that explore concepts of the figure, shifting topographies, and landscape. The piece she submitted to the Astaire Prize, Suture self, demonstrates the central tenets of her practice: producing painterly and sculptural surfaces out of fabric and thread; mixing abstraction and figuration to render compositions not immediately resolvable; and working only with scrap, second-hand or recycled materials to create sustainable artworks.
Jackie Gibb’s work, Consider Your Source, is a sculpture made from a repurposed fish tank and thousands of folded paper boats. Created for 2024 as an election year in the UK, it reminds the viewer to think about the statistics presented during campaigning and to question how and why they are being used.
Encapsulating the conflicting politics and points of view from every printed newspaper in Scotland, she has made thousands of paper boats, each one representing a person who has crossed the English Channel on a small boat and gone from a turbulent sea to a life akin to being trapped inside a fish tank, waiting.
